Investigating Augmented Reality Animals as Companions Humananimal interaction has been studied in a variety of settings and for a range of populations, with some findings pointing towards its benefits for physical, mental and social human health. Technological advances opened up new opportunities for researchers to replicate humananimal interactions with robotic and graphical animals, and to investigate humananimal relationships for different applications such as mental health and education. Although graphical animals have been studied in the past in the physical health and education domains, most of the time, their realizations were bound to computer screens, limiting their full potential, especially in terms of companionship and the provision of support. In this work, we describe past research efforts investigating influences of humananimal interaction on mental health and different realization of such animals. We discuss the idea that augmented reality could offer potential for humananimal interaction in terms of mental and social health, and propose several aspects of augmented reality animals that warrant further research for such interactions.

Walking Your Virtual Dog: Analysis of Awareness and Proxemics with Simulated Support Animals in Augmented Reality Domestic animals have a long history of enriching human lives physically and mentally by filling a variety of different roles, such as service animals, emotional support animals, companions, and pets. Despite this, technological realizations of such animals in augmented reality (AR) are largely underexplored in terms of their behavior and interactions as well as effects they might have on human usersu0027 perception or behavior. In this paper, we describe a simulated virtual companion animal, in the form of a dog, in a shared AR space. We investigated its effects on participantsu0027 perception and behavior, including locomotion related to proxemics, with respect to their AR dog and other real people in the environment. We conducted a 2 by 2 mixed factorial humansubject study, in which we varied (i) the AR dogu0027s awareness and behavior with respect to other people in the physical environment and (ii) the awareness and behavior of those people with respect to the AR dog. Our results show that having an AR companion dog changes participantsu0027 locomotion behavior, proxemics, and social interaction with other people who can or can not see the AR dog. We also show that the AR dogu0027s simulated awareness and behaviors have an impact on participantsu0027 perception, including copresence, animalism, perceived physicality, and dogu0027s perceived awareness of the participant and environment. We discuss our findings and present insights and implications for the realization of effective AR animal companions.