# A Design Space for Virtuality-Introduced Internet of Things
## 3 Analysis of Current IoT Products and Services that Introduce Virtuality
### Case Studies of Digital Services Introducing Virtuality
#### 3.2.3 Ambient Bot  
Currently, our cognitive overload is increased with information technologies. For example, a large amount of information is presented to us in public displays located in trains and stations. Modern social media attempts to capture our available attention by ubiquitous computing technologies [52]. For a more comfortable and peaceful daily life, information should be ambiently delivered to us only when the information is wanted. In addition, the information should be available to us without extra time and effort.  
Ambient Bot is a notification service that ambiently provides daily information to users based on the assumption that the users wear a lightweight HMD [47]. The user can see a virtual creature visualized with VR technologies and render the creature in the real world with AR technologies. Figure 3 shows the basic concept of Ambient Bot. The creature only imparts daily information based on the user's interests when he/she gazes at the creature; however, the creature leaves the user's scope when he/she does not want to receive any information from the creature. Therefore, the creature can ambiently exist in the user's view without disturbing his/her current activities when he/she does not focus on the creature. In addition, Ambient Bot provides the information in a social manner because the user develops an intimate relationship with the creature [53]; thus, the interaction with the creature will enable a richer daily life [54].  
In the current character design in Ambient Bot, we chose a jellyfish character that floats and moves in a user's surroundings, because a floating jellyfish is not a strange image in our daily space, especially for young Japanese individuals who consider a jellyfish to be a common agent in popular Japanese animations [55]. On the other hand, if we chose a pet animal as a virtual creature, the user may consider the pet floating in the daily space to be unnatural. In addition, the user may sometimes be too empathetic with the pet animal, which is undesirable for the aim of Ambient Bot because it may increase the user's cognitive overload. Similarly, a human is not appropriate for Ambient Bot as a virtual agent because a human may not be neutral, which can increase his/her cognitive overload.  
As shown in Figure 4, a prototype system is constructed with Unity and shows the virtual character using Oculus Rift. The character conveys the information when the character is at the center of the user's view and stops speaking when the character is out of the center of the view. In this system, the situation in which the character is at the center of the user's view is defined as the character making eye contact with the user. Therefore, the character speaks while the user makes eye contact with the character.  
The cases in which Ambient Bot was employed were extracted by a preliminary user study using the prototype. In the user study, seven participants are interviewed about the use cases. Table 1 lists the results. The result indicates that the extracted use cases are classified into three categories. The first category is whether the participants like using Ambient Bot. The second category includes the type of content that users like to receive from Ambient Bot. The third category entails how users want to use Ambient Bot.  
Figure 4: Prototype of Ambient Bot.  
Figure 3: Ambient Bot Concept.