Designing believable interaction by applying social conventions

One of the goals of the research area of believable agents is to incorporate those capabilities that can make interaction with agents realistic and believable. We argue that it is necessary to consider social conventions in designing believable interaction; they are mechanisms used by conversation partners to coordinate behavior and communication. As a starting point, we began by identifying essential social conventions that are used to coordinate interaction in the physical world. We performed an empirical study to investigate how these conventions are used by people in virtual environments when they interact; we were interested to see which conventions were used naturally and how they influenced behavior. In our results, we report how these conventions were used to regulate behavior in virtual environments. We present design recommendations for how these results can be applied to guide the design of believable interaction.