Interaction with an agent in Blended Reality

This paper proposes a Blended Reality Agent called “BReA” that can exist in both the real and virtual world and has communicative advantages that is more than simply the sum of those of a robotic agent and an on-screen agent. BReA can seamlessly transfer between the real world and virtual world and users can communicate with BReA without interruption during the transference. We conducted a field test and showed that users can recognize when it points from the virtual world to a real world object after it moves from the real world to virtual world. This result supports a hypothesis that communicating with BReA helps users recognize the link between real world and virtual world objects and virtual world information.