# Pre-touch reaction is preferred over post-touch reaction in interaction with displayed agent

## TL;DR

This paper explores how pre-touch reactions in displayed agents improve human interaction experiences compared to post-touch reactions.

## Contribution

The study introduces a displayed agent system that detects pre-touch behaviors and evaluates their effectiveness in human interaction.

## Key findings

- People significantly preferred pre-touch reactions over post-touch reactions in perceived feelings.
- The developed system successfully detected both touch events and pre-touch behaviors.
- Pre-touch reactions were found to enhance the naturalness of human-agent interactions.

## Abstract

A pre-touch reaction, which is a response before a physical contact, is an essential factor for natural human-agent interaction. Although numerous studies have investigated the effectiveness of pre-touch reaction design for virtual agents in virtual reality (VR) environments and robots in physical environments, one area remains underexplored: displayed agents, i.e., on-screen computer graphics agents. To design an appropriate pre-touch reaction for such a displayed agent, this article focused on the display’s physical boundary as a criterion for the pre-touch reaction of the agent. This article developed a displayed agent system that can detect both the touch events on the screen and the pre-touch behaviors of the interacting people around the display. This study examined the effectiveness of the pre-touch reactions of the displayed agent by the developed system in experiments with human participants. The findings revealed that people significantly preferred pre-touch reactions over post-touch reactions in the context of perceived feelings.