This research aims to investigate existing approaches to development and designguidelines of affective interfaces in relation to Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs)from the perspective of technology, psychology and design. It also asks whether theaffective influences of ECAs differ across the various devices used to display thesecharacters. This research conducted two surveys to investigate the affective interactionsbetween users and agents. The first hardware interface experiment explores the emotionalinfluences of ECAs and user-agent relationships when ECAs are applied to computersand portable devices. The second character interface experiment studies the affectiveinfluences of ECAs on users in the learning tasks. The thesis asks whether there aresignificant experiential differences between ECAs when they are represented by differenthardware interfaces and character classifications, such as emotional influences, characterpreference, user engagement and user-agent relationships. This research followed designguidelines that enabled the exploration of existing research and my own originalexperiments into the practical use of multi-agent in the context of a language learningwebsite. I argue that the user is always at the centre of any ECA design, and thereforeneeds to be at the centre of any design process. The thesis discusses some concepts fordeveloping agent interfaces with more positive affective influences for the completion oflearning tasks.The main contributions of this research are summarised as follows: (1) the hardwareinterfaces of ECAs have a distinct relationship to the affective responses of users,including emotional influences and user-agent relationships, (2) character classificationscan be related to human affective factors, such as character preference, user engagementand user-agent relationships, and (3) there are significant relations that need to beaccounted for among character preference, engagement and user-agent relationships.
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