The Role of Embodiment and Perspective in Direction-Giving Systems

In this paper, we describe an evaluation of the impact of embodiment, the effect of different kinds of embodiment, and the benefits of different aspects of embodiment, on direction-giving systems. We compared a robot, embodied conversational agent (ECA), and GPS giving directions, when these systems used speaker-perspective gestures, listener-perspective gestures and no gestures. Results demonstrated that, while there was no difference in direction-giving performance between the robot and the ECA, and little difference in participants’perceptions, there was a considerable effect of the type of gesture employed, and several interesting interactions between type of embodiment and aspects of embodiment.