Do human-human social interactions carry over to humanvirtual human social interactions? How does this affect future interface designers? We replicated classical tests of social influence known as the social facilitation and inhibition effects. Social facilitation/inhibition theory states that when in the presence of others, people perform simple tasks better and complex tasks worse. Participants were randomly assigned to perform both simple and complex tasks alone and in the presence of either a real human, a projected virtual human, or a virtual human in a headmounted display. Our results showed participants were inhibited by the presence of others, whether real or virtual. That is, participants performed worse on the complex task, both in terms of percent correct and reaction times, when in the presence of others than when alone. Social facilitation did not occur with the real or virtual human. We discuss these results and their implications for future interface designers. Author Keywords Virtual humans, avatars, interface agents, human-computer

A reusable agent-based generic model is presented for a specific class of Ambient Intelligence applications: those cases addressing human wellbeing and functioning from a human-like understanding. The model incorporates ontologies, knowledge and dynamic models from human-directed sciences such as psychology, social science, neuroscience and biomedical sciences. The model has been formally specified, and it is shown how for specific applications it can be instantiated by application-specific elements, thus providing an executable specification that can be used for prototyping. Moreover, it is shown how dynamic properties can be formally specified and verified against generated traces.

We present results from an empirical study investigating the effect of embodiment and minimal gestures in an interactive drumming game consisting of an autonomous child-sized humanoid robot (KASPAR) playing with child participants. In this study, each participant played three games with a humanoid robot that played a drum whilst simultaneously making (or not making) head gestures. The three games included the partici-pant interacting with the real robot (physical embodiment condition), interacting with a hidden robot when only the sound of the robot is heard (disembodiment condition; note that the term ‘disembodiment ’ is used in this paper specifically to refer to an experimental condition where a physical robot produces the sound cues, but is not visible to the participants), or interacting with a real-time image of the robot (virtual em-bodiment condition). We used a mixed design where repeated measures were used to evaluate embodiment effects and independent-groups measures were used to study the gestures effects. Data from the implemen-tation of a human–robot interaction experiment with 66 children are presented, and statistically analyzed in terms of participants ’ subjective experiences and drumming performance of the human–robot pair. The sub-jective experiences showed significant differences for the different embodiment conditions when gestures were used in terms of enjoyment of the game, and perceived intelligence and appearance of the robot. The