Where Robots and Virtual Agents Meet: A Survey of Social Interaction Across Milgram’s Reality-Virtuality Continuum

Traditionally, social interaction research has concentrated on either fully virtually embodied agents (e.g. embodied conversational agents) or fully physically embodied agents (e.g. robots). For some time, however, both areas have started augmenting their agents’ capabilities for social interaction using ubiquitous and intelligent environments. We are placing different agent systems for social interaction along Milgram’s Reality-Virtuality Continuum—according to the degree they are embodied in a physical, virtual or mixed reality environment—and show systems that follow the next logical step in this progression, namely social interaction in the middle of Milgram’s continuum, that is, agents richly embodied in the physical and virtual world. This paper surveys the field of social interaction research with embodied agents with a particular view towards their embodiment forms and highlights some of the advantages and issues associated with the very recent field of social interaction with mixed reality agents.