Poster: Perceived Distraction and Annoyance in a VR Listening Task

While listening to Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) in Virtual Reality (VR), background events can reduce both task performance and comfort. We ran an exploratory study with n = 5 participants who listened to ECA dialogues in a virtual open-plan office while performing a dual - task paradigm (keyword-detection and recall). Distractors varied by sound source (person vs. object) and environmental fit, where congruent distractors (office -specific stimuli, everyday stimuli) fit the virtual workspace, and incongruent distractors (extraordinary stimuli) violated it. Descriptively, distraction and annoyance ratings showed a partial divergence: incongruent distractors were perceived as most distracting, whereas office-congruent object sounds produced the highest annoyance ratings. These preliminary findings suggest that distraction and annoyance may constitute distinct dimensions of user experience.