Exploring Interaction Strategies for Virtual Characters to Induce Stress in Simulated Job Interviews

Job interviews come with a number of challenges, especially for young people who are out of employment, education, or training (NEETs). This paper presents an approach to a job training simulation environment that employs two virtual characters and social cue recognition techniques to create an immersive interactive job interview. The two virtual characters are created with different social behavior profiles, understanding and demanding, which consequently influences the level of difficulty of the simulation as well as the impact on the user. In this context we present a user study which investigates the feasibility of the proposed approach by measuring the effect the different virtual characters have on users.