Virtual agents are animated, life-like characters used in virtual learning environment to facilitate learning tasks. Since social relationship between the virtual agent and learner is important, the design of virtual agent appearance should be emphasised. The realism level of virtual agent may cause distress to the users, especially when the character mimics human; which is based on the uncanny valley phenomenon highlighted by Mori in 1970. Therefore, the virtual agent effectiveness in terms of promoting positive emotion is influenced by the character’s realism. Moreover, learners’ acceptance of the virtual agent depends on their emotion towards it, which is recognised through their stimulus. Hence, emotional valence and arousal is expected to affect students’ emotion in learning. Therefore, this paper proposes a conceptual framework to be the guidelines in the development of animated virtual agents to maximise students’ positive emotions in learning. The Mayer’s Cognitive Th.....

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This research was aimed to analyse students’ emotions caused by the character’s realism design in the dimension of valence and arousal and its’ mediating effects on emotions in learning. 2D female virtual agents with four different realism appearances namely realistic, semi-realistic, stylized and cartoon-like were designed and developed. Quasi-experimental design was used to answer the research questions derived and the data obtained was analysed using ANOVA, post hoc and bootstrap mediation analysis. The experiment was carried out with 600 Electrical Engineering students from seven polytechnics in Malaysia. Students were divided into four different groups using multistage sampling methods, where each group consisted of 150 students who underwent four different realism designs of the virtual agents respectively. The ANOVA test show that there are significant differences on valence (F (3, 596) = 15.48, p=0.00, .p2= 0.07), arousal (F (3, 596) = 15.79, p=0.00, .p2= 0.07) and emotio.....

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