Sympathy for the digital: Influence of synthetic voice on affinity, social presence and empathy for photorealistic virtual humans

In this paper, we investigate the effect of a realism mismatch in the voice and appearance of a photorealistic virtual character in both immersive and screen-mediated virtual contexts. While many studies have investigated voice attributes for robots, not much is known about the effect voice naturalness has on the perception of realistic virtual characters. We conducted the first experiment in Virtual Reality (VR) with over two hundred...