My Body, My Avatar: How People Perceive Their Avatars in Social Virtual Reality

Freeman, Guo; Zamanifard, Samaneh; Maloney, Divine; Adkins, Alexandra

doi:10.1145/3334480.3382923

Cited by 88 publications

(66 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…In a recent study, based on interview with social VR users, Freeman et al (2020) highlight the importance of avatar customization to users and emphasize that users attribute an "intimate connection" between their body and the avatar, resulting in a desire to make the avatar similar to themselves. Several participants in their study pointed out the fact that social VR platforms do not offer tools and features for users to easily create a high resemblance avatar.…”

Section: Avatar Customizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Working Together on Diverse Tasks: A Longitudinal Study on Individual Workload, Presence and Emotional Recognition in Collaborative Virtual Environments

Khojasteh

Won

2021

Front. Virtual Real.

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Numerous studies have shown the potential benefits of collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) for distributed teams. However, there are few longitudinal studies on collaboration in immersive virtual environments, and existing studies mostly examine how pairs or groups adapt over time. In a longitudinal study, we examined what does and does not change over time as individual users adapt to collaboration in virtual environments. In our mixed-methods, exploratory study, we matched 20 participants in random pairs over five sessions. We assigned each participant to complete a different collaborative task, with a different partner, in each session. Our quantitative data analysis and qualitative interview data show that adaptation to VR increased significantly over time. Presence ratings did not show change over time, but participants reported developing new ways to communicate in VR. We also identified patterns indicating a relationship between a person’s emotional state and their partner’s ability to recognize their emotion. We conclude with a discussion of our findings and provide design implications and future directions for designers and researchers in the field.

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Section: Avatar Customizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Working Together on Diverse Tasks: A Longitudinal Study on Individual Workload, Presence and Emotional Recognition in Collaborative Virtual Environments

Khojasteh

Won

2021

Front. Virtual Real.

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“…Recent surveys have focused on cataloging the scope of the interface (Jonas et al, 2019), the types of avatar supported (Kolesnichenko et al, 2019) or specific functionality such as facial expressions (Tanenbaum et al, 2020). Other recent work has focused on longer term relationships (Moustafa and Steed, 2018) in social VR, development of trust in social with others (Pan and Steed, 2017) or how users perceive their avatars (Freeman et al, 2020).…”

Section: Usability Of Social Virtual Realitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Virtual Reality Platform Comparison and Evaluation Using a Guided Group Walkthrough Method

Liu

Steed

2021

Front. Virtual Real.

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As virtual reality (VR) headsets become more commercially accessible, a range of social platforms have been developed that exploit the immersive nature of these systems. There is a growing interest in using these platforms in social and work contexts, but relatively little work into examining the usability choices that have been made. We developed a usability inspection method based on cognitive walkthrough that we call guided group walkthrough. Guided group walkthrough is applied to existing social VR platforms by having a guide walk the participants through a series of abstract social tasks that are common across the platforms. Using this method we compared six social VR platforms for the Oculus Quest. After constructing an appropriate task hierarchy and walkthrough question structure for social VR, we ran several groups of participants through the walkthrough process. We undercover usability challenges that are common across the platforms, identify specific design considerations and comment on the utility of the walkthrough method in this situation.

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“…In the past five years, commercial social VR applications such as Facebook Spaces (discontinued in 2019), AltspaceVR, VR Chat and Rec Room have emerged as an important research agenda for VR and HCI communities. However, social VR research is still in its infancy as existing literature mainly focuses on design considerations [38,39], avatar perceptions [17,18], and interaction dynamics [9,[33][34][35][36]. This demonstrates that these immersive social ecosystems have emerged beyond purely gaming and entertainment to instead cultivate more intimate family experiences [35] and self explorations via embodied avatars [18].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, social VR research is still in its infancy as existing literature mainly focuses on design considerations [38,39], avatar perceptions [17,18], and interaction dynamics [9,[33][34][35][36]. This demonstrates that these immersive social ecosystems have emerged beyond purely gaming and entertainment to instead cultivate more intimate family experiences [35] and self explorations via embodied avatars [18]. Yet, they also raise a wide range of new challenges and questions regarding negative social experiences and interactions, such as harassment [9] and privacy concerns in these growing immersive spaces.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anonymity vs. Familiarity: Self-Disclosure and Privacy in Social Virtual Reality

Maloney

Zamanifard

Freeman

2020

26th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology

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Understanding how and why users reveal information about their self in online social spaces and what they perceive as privacy online is a central research agenda in HCI. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews, in this paper we focus on what type of information users disclose, to whom they reveal information, and concerns they had regarding self-disclosure in social Virtual Reality (VR)where multiple users can interact with one another through VR head-mounted displays in 3D virtual spaces. Our findings show that overall, users felt comfortable to disclose their emotions, personal experience, and personal information in social VR. However, they also acknowledged that disclosing personal information in social VR was an inevitable trade-off: giving up bio-metric information in order to better use the system. We contribute to existing literature on self-disclosure and privacy online by focusing on social VR as an emerging novel online social space. We also explicate implications for designing and developing future social VR applications. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing.

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My Body, My Avatar: How People Perceive Their Avatars in Social Virtual Reality

Cited by 88 publications

References 20 publications

Working Together on Diverse Tasks: A Longitudinal Study on Individual Workload, Presence and Emotional Recognition in Collaborative Virtual Environments

Working Together on Diverse Tasks: A Longitudinal Study on Individual Workload, Presence and Emotional Recognition in Collaborative Virtual Environments

Social Virtual Reality Platform Comparison and Evaluation Using a Guided Group Walkthrough Method

Anonymity vs. Familiarity: Self-Disclosure and Privacy in Social Virtual Reality

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