Like everything else in VR,
it is important that you test your social interaction application
with participants to really understand whether it works or not.
You should try to test it with those who your app is designed for.
But if the app is designed for a small group of people,
we might have difficulty accessing to them.
For instance, if you are developing a psychotherapy app for
patients with a particular kind of mental health problem,
you should test it with other people first to really
polish your app before moving out to this special group.
After your participant has spent some time interacting with your avatar or agent,
you could get their opinion by giving them a set of questionnaires.
And in the questionnaire,
you should try to use the name or description of
the virtual character rather than the phrase virtual character,
because the phrase, itself,
implies that it is not real.
And some people are more likely to be primed by that phrase and as a result,
rate the interaction is less realistic.
You will want to understand if the plausibility illusion has worked.
For this, you could ask questions such as,
how much did you find yourself behaving as if Christina were
real and how much do you have physical responses,
such as changing heart rate, blushing,
sweating, etc., to Christina as if she were real.
You could also use other questionnaires often used in social psychology.
You could ask questions such as,
do you like Christina?
Do you want to spend more time with Christina?
Do you feel Christina is reliable?
And, do you feel you had a connection with Christina?
In order to fully understand your results,
you might also want to get the participants to answer some questions about themselves.
For instance, their own personality could
have an impact on how they answer these questions.
You could also ask them to comment on their experience directly.
You might want to ask specifically if they
experienced any break in the plausibility illusion.
That is, has there been any times where Christina did something weird,
which reminded them that there was not real.
You can ask them to comment on things that really worked for them.
Were there times where they found the interaction particularly appealing?
You also want to ask if the VR app works for the specific task it is designed for.
If it's a customer service agent,
did you get the information you wanted?
Are you satisfied with this experience?
If it's a collaborative task involving many people,
was everyone involved in the discussion?
Did they manage to agree with each other and are all happy with the result?
A smooth social interaction normally leads to good interpersonal connection, rapport,
and trust so you can test how much participants are willing to
trust the agent or avatar after spending some time with them.
Or you can record their interaction in VR and review it yourself,
or even watch it with the participant and ask them to comment on it.
Looking at what someone does in an interaction is
often a lot more telling than asking them afterwards how they felt.