Abstract
Avatar use on video-conference platforms has found dual purpose in recent times as a potential method for ensuring privacy and improving subjective engagement with remote meeting, provided one can also ensure a minimal loss in the quality of social interaction and sense of personal presence. This work focuses on interactions of this sort through real-time motion captured 3D personalized virtual avatars in a 2D video-conferencing context. Our experiments were designed with the intention of exploring previously defined perceptual illusions that occur with avatar-use in Virtual and Augmented Reality settings, outside of the immersive technological domains where they are normally measured. The research described here was aimed at empirically evaluating three separate dimensions of human-avatar interaction. The first was humans-as-avatars, with experimental conditions that were designed to measure changes to subjective perceptions of self-face ownership and self-concept. The second focus was other-perception, with the unique design of the studies outlined below among the first to measure social presence in a video-call between two human-driven avatars. The third emphasis was on the experiential content involved in avatar use, as there were measurements for emotion induction, fatigue and behavior change included in the data collection. The results describe some evidence for face and body ownership, while participants also reported high levels of social presence with the other avatar, indicating that avatar cameras could be a favorable alternative to non-camera feeds in video conferencing. There were also some useful insights gained regarding emotion elicitation in non-video vs. avatar conditions, as well as avatar-induced behavior change.
Highlights
Virtual, mixed reality and screen-based applications for avatar use have developed considerably in terms of the technical challenges that have been documented around producing realistic virtual characters
Avatar studies in Virtual Environments (VEs) have empirically validated self-avatar influences on cognitive load (Steed et al, 2016), pain modulation (Romano et al, 2014) and perceptions of self-concept (Yee and Bailenson, 2007a; Heide et al, 2013). These specific applications of avatarinteraction science have been developed from a volume of work which has attempted to define the qualitative feeling of being a virtual self-representation of oneself; the Sense of Embodiment (SoE)
The data from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) was taken at face value, we used a repeated measures Analysis Of Variance (ANOVA) to analyze the linguistic affect data
Summary
Virtual, mixed reality and screen-based applications for avatar use have developed considerably in terms of the technical challenges that have been documented around producing realistic virtual characters. Avatar studies in Virtual Environments (VEs) have empirically validated self-avatar influences on cognitive load (Steed et al, 2016), pain modulation (Romano et al, 2014) and perceptions of self-concept (Yee and Bailenson, 2007a; Heide et al, 2013). These specific applications of avatarinteraction science have been developed from a volume of work which has attempted to define the qualitative feeling of being a virtual self-representation of oneself; the Sense of Embodiment (SoE). Virtual collaboration methods have drawn widespread attention in the current era of remote working. Remote collaboration has instead been more widely conducted through video-conferencing media, which have proven to be useful for conducting research and gathering qualitative data (Archibald et al, 2019)
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