Studying social interactions through immersive virtual environment technology: virtues, pitfalls, and future challenges

Abstract

The goal of the present review is to explain how immersive virtual environment technology (IVET) can be used for the study of social interactions and how the use of virtual humans in immersive virtual environments can advance research and application in many different fields. Researchers studying individual differences in social interactions are typically interested in keeping the behavior and the appearance of the interaction partner constant across participants. With IVET researchers have full control over the interaction partners, can standardize them while still keeping the simulation realistic. Virtual simulations are valid: growing evidence shows that indeed studies conducted with IVET can replicate some well-known findings of social psychology. Moreover, IVET allows researchers to subtly manipulate characteristics of the environment (e.g., visual cues to prime participants) or of the social partner (e.g., his/her race) to investigate their influences on participants’ behavior and cognition. Furthermore, manipulations that would be difficult or impossible in real life (e.g., changing participants’ height) can be easily obtained with IVET. Beside the advantages for theoretical research, we explore the most recent training and clinical applications of IVET, its integration with other technologies (e.g., social sensing) and future challenges for researchers (e.g., making the communication between virtual humans and participants smoother).

Examining ecological validity in social interaction: problems of visual fidelity, gaze, and social potential

“…Virtual reality (VR) and virtual characters provide other ways in which to increase the representativeness of the phenomena of interest whilst in the lab, and such methods have been found to be valid for a number of tasks (Bombari et al 2015). Virtual characters might therefore provide a more valid way of testing social interaction, at least compared to static images or pre-recorded video stimuli.…”

Perceiving attitudes expressed through nonverbal behaviors in immersive virtual environments

“…For instance, in [Philipp et al 2012], the authors report that the sole presence (without interaction) of virtual agents in an immersive virtual scene elicited more smile responses from participants to positive stimuli. In [Bombari et al 2015], the authors describe how powerful it is to include virtual humans in social experiments conducted within IVE as they offer a way to standardized the interaction partners and simulate a broad range of different interactions at a very low-cost.…”

Cell_DEVS: An Approach to Model the Influence of Social Interactions in Human Behavior

“…To understand the influence of social interaction on behavior patterns, we need to observe and study humans engaged in a variety of social contexts (Bombari et al 2015). A major problem in the study of human social interaction and the effect on human behavior using natural observation is the time taken by the desired event to occur naturally in the society with us being present to observe it.…”