The Effect of Valence and Arousal on Virtual Agent's Designs in Quiz Based Multimedia Learning Environment

Virtual agents are animated life-like characters generally used in virtual learning environments to facilitate learning tasks. With virtual agent, students can hold meaningful interactions throughout the learning process for more effective cognition. Hence, the effectiveness of virtual agent in term of promoting positive emotions is very much related to character realism influence. The level of realism of virtual agent may cause distress to the users, especially when the character mimics like human which was based on the uncanny valley phenomenon. For that, four different realism designs of virtual agents (realistic, semi-realistic, stylized and cartoon-like agents) in Quiz based Multimedia Learning Environment (QMLE) had been developed as experimental items and tested as experimental items to analyze emotions in the dimension of valence and arousal. Quasi-experimental design was used to answer the research questions derived and the data obtained was analysed using ANOVA and post hoc. The experiment was carried out on 600 electric engineering students from seven polytechnics of Malaysia. The experiment was carried out with 600 Electrical Engineering students from seven polytechnics in Malaysia. Students were divided into four different groups where each group consisted of 150 students who underwent four different realism designs of the virtual agents respectively. It has been found that the four different realism designs of virtual agents fall at high affective state with high arousal and positive valence. Consequently, the designed virtual agents escaped from uncanny valley effect.