The effect of avatar realism in immersive social virtual realities

By Marc Erich Latoschik, Daniel Roth, Dominik Gall, Jascha Achenbach, Thomas Waltemate, Mario Botsch. Virtual Reality Software and Technology, 2017

400 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper investigates the effect of avatar realism on embodiment and social interactions in Virtual Reality (VR). We compared abstract avatar representations based on a wooden mannequin with high fidelity avatars generated from photogrammetry 3D scan methods. Both avatar representations were alternately applied to participating users and to the virtual counterpart in dyadic social encounters to examine the impact of avatar realism on self-embodiment and social interaction quality. Users were immersed in a virtual room via a head mounted display (HMD). Their full-body movements were tracked and mapped to respective movements of their avatars. Embodiment was induced by presenting the users' avatars to themselves in a virtual mirror. Afterwards they had to react to a non-verbal behavior of a virtual interaction partner they encountered in the virtual space. Several measures were taken to analyze the effect of the appearance of the users' avatars as well as the effect of the appearance of the others' avatars on the users. The realistic avatars were rated significantly more human-like when used as avatars for the others and evoked a stronger acceptance in terms of virtual body ownership (VBO). There also was some indication of a potential uncanny valley. Additionally, there was an indication that the appearance of the others' avatars impacts the self-perception of the users.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc7c7cd1a68053a74f9aa0e51ee6d3e68be6af89

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Marc Erich Latoschik
2. Mario Botsch
3. Daniel Roth
4. Thomas Waltemate
5. Dominik Gall

In Social Psychology

1. Marc Erich Latoschik
2. Mario Botsch
3. Daniel Roth
4. Thomas Waltemate
5. Dominik Gall

In Human-Computer Interaction

1. Carlos Bermejo
2. Marc Erich Latoschik
3. Mario Botsch
4. Daniel Roth
5. Thomas Waltemate
6. Dominik Gall
7. Pan Hui

Citations in the corpus

• All One Needs to Know about Metaverse: A Complete Survey on Technological Singularity, Virtual Ecosystem, and Research Agenda (2021, background): “tion [566], colour [567] and positions [568], fidelity [569], the levels of detail in avatars’ gestures [570], shadow [571], the design of avatar behaviours [560], synchronisation of the avatar’s body movements [572], Walk-in-Place movements [573], ability of recognising the users’ self motions refl”
• The Impact of Avatar Personalization and Immersion on Virtual Body Ownership, Presence, and Emotional Response (2018, background): “This article reports novel findings on two factors triggering or promoting embodiment effects in Virtual Reality based on human-like avatars.”