Effect of Avatar Anthropomorphism on Body Ownership, Attractiveness and Collaboration in Immersive Virtual Environments
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Date
2020
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association
Abstract
Effective collaboration in immersive virtual environments requires to be able to communicate flawlessly using both verbal and non-verbal communication. We present an experiment investigating the impact of anthropomorphism on the sense of body ownership, avatar attractiveness and performance in an asymmetric collaborative task. Using three avatars presenting different facial properties, participants have to solve a construction game according to their partner's instructions. Results reveal no significant difference in terms of body ownership, but demonstrate significant differences concerning attractiveness and completion duration of the collaborative task. However the relative verbal interaction duration seems not impacted by the anthropomorphism level of the characters, meaning that participants were able to interact verbally independently of the way their character physically express their words in the virtual environment. Unexpectedly, correlation analyses also reveal a link between attractiveness and performance. The more attractive the avatar, the shorter the completion duration of the game. One could argue that, in the context of this experiment, avatar attractiveness could have led to an improvement in non-verbal communication as users could be more prone to observe their partner which translates into better performance in collaborative tasks. Other experiments must be conduced using gaze tracking to support this new hypothesis.
Description
@inproceedings{10.2312:egve.20201261,
booktitle = {ICAT-EGVE 2020 - International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence and Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments},
editor = {Argelaguet, Ferran and McMahan, Ryan and Sugimoto, Maki},
title = {{Effect of Avatar Anthropomorphism on Body Ownership, Attractiveness and Collaboration in Immersive Virtual Environments}},
author = {Gorisse, Geoffrey and Dubosc, Charlotte and Christmann, Olivier and Fleury, Sylvain and Poinsot, Killian and Richir, Simon},
year = {2020},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISSN = {1727-530X},
ISBN = {978-3-03868-111-3},
DOI = {10.2312/egve.20201261}
}