Article

The impact of avatar realism and eye gaze control on perceived quality of communication in a shared immersive virtual environment

Authors:

Vinoba Vinayagamoorthy,

Anthony Steed, and

M. Angela SasseAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '03: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2003

Pages 529 - 536

https://doi.org/10.1145/642611.642703

Published: 05 April 2003 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents an experiment designed to investigate the impact of scommunication in an immersive virtual environment.Participants were paired by gender and were randomly assigned to a CAVE-like system or a head-mounted display. Both were represented by a humanoid avatar in the shared 3D environment. The visual appearance of the avatars was either basic and genderless (like a "match-stick" figure), or more photorealistic and gender-specific. Similarly, eye gaze behavior was either random or inferred from voice, to reflect different levels of behavioral realism.Our comparative analysis of 48 post-experiment questionnaires confirms earlier findings from non-immersive studies using semi-photorealistic avatars, where inferred gaze significantly outperformed random gaze. However responses to the lower-realism avatar are adversely affected by inferred gaze, revealing a significant interaction effect between appearance and behavior. We discuss the importance of aligning visual and behavioral realism for increased avatar effectiveness.

References

[1]

Argyle, M. Bodily Communication. Methuen & Co., London, 1975.

[2]

Argyle, M. Bodily Communication. 2nd ed., Methuen & Co., London, 1988.

[3]

Argyle, M. and Cook, M. Gaze and Mutual Gaze. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1976.

[4]

Argyle, M. and Ingham, R. Mutual Gaze and Proximity. Semiotica 6 (1972), 32--49.

[5]

Argyle, M., Ingham, R., Alkema, F., and McCallin, M. The Different Functions of Gaze. Semiotica 7 (1973), 10--32.

[6]

Bailenson, J. N., Blascovich, J., Beall, A. C., and Loomis, J. M. Equilibrium theory revisited: Mutual gaze and personal space in virtual environments. Presence: Teleoperators and Virutal Environments 10, 6 (2001), 583--598.

Digital Library

[7]

Benford, S., Bowers, J., Fahlen, L. E., Greenhalgh, C., and Snowdon, D. User Embodiment in Collaborative Virtual Environments, in Proceedings of CHI'95: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Denver, CO, 1995), 242--249.

Digital Library

[8]

Cassell, J., Sullivan, J., Prevost, S., and Churchill, E., Eds., Embodied Conversational Agents, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000.

[9]

Cruz-Neira, C., Sandin, D. J., and DeFanti, T. A. Surround-Screen Projection-Based Virtual Reality: The Design and Implementation of the CAVE, in Proceedings of Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH) Proceedings, Annual Conference Series 1993), 135--142.

Digital Library

[10]

Eyematic. Available at http://www.eyematic.com.

[11]

Frecon, E., Smith, G., Steed, A., Stenius, M., and Stahl, O. An Overview of the COVEN Platform. Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments 10 (2001), 109--127.

Digital Library

[12]

Fukayama, A., Sawaki, M., Ohno, T., Murase, H., Hagita, N., and Mukawa, N. Expressing Personality of Interface Agents by Gaze, in Proceedings of INTERACT (Tokyo, Japan, 2001), 793--794.

[13]

Fukayama, A., Takehiko, O., Mukawa, N., Sawaki, M., and Hagita, N. Messages Embedded in gaze of Interface Agents - Impression management with agent's gaze -, in Proceedings of SGICHI - Conference in Human factor in Computing Systems (Minneapolis, USA, 2002), ACM Press, 41--48.

Digital Library

[14]

Garau, M., Slater, M., Bee, S., and Sasse, M.-A. The Impact of Eye Gaze on Communication using Humanoid Avatars, in Proceedings of CHI'01: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Seattle, WA, 2001), 309--316.

Digital Library

[15]

H-Anim. Humanoid Animation Working Group, Available at http://www.hanim.org.

[16]

Kendon, A. Some Functions of Gaze-Direction in Social Interaction. Acta Psychologica 26 (1967), 22--63.

[17]

Lee, S. H., Badler, J. B., and Badler, N. I. Eyes Alive, in Proceedings of 29th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (San Antonio, TX, 2002), ACM Press, 637--644.

Digital Library

[18]

Sellen, A. Remote Conversations: The Effect of Mediating talk with Technology. Human-Computer Interaction 10, 4 (1995), 401--444.

Digital Library

[19]

Slater, M., Howell, J., Steed, A., Pertaub, D.-P., Garau, M., and Springel, S. Acting in Virtual Reality, in Proceedings of Proceedings of ACM Collaborative Virtual Environments (San Francisco, CA, 2000), 103--110.

Digital Library

[20]

Slater, M., Steed, A., and Chrysanthou, Y. Computer Graphics and Virtual Environments: From Realism to Real-Time. Addison Wesley Publishers, Harlow, England, 2001.

Digital Library

[21]

Slater, M. and Steed, A. Meeting People Virtually: Experiments in Virtual Environments. In R. Schroeder, Ed., The Social Life of Avatars: Presence and Interaction in Shared Virtual Environments, Springer Verlag, Berlin, 2001.

Digital Library

[22]

Slater, M., Steed, A., Mc.Carthy, J., and Maringelli, F. The Influence of Body Movement on Subjective Presence in Virtual Environments. Human Factors 40, 3 (1998), 469--477.

[23]

Steed, A., Mortensen, J., and Frecon, E. Spelunking: Experiences using the DIVE System on CAVE-like Platforms. In B. Frohlicj, J. Deisinger, and H.-J. Bullinger, Eds., Immersive Projection Technologies and Virtual Environments, Springer-Verlag, 2001, 153--164.

Digital Library

[24]

Straus, S. and McGrath, J. E. Does the Medium Matter: The Interaction of Task and Technology on Group Performance and Member Reactions. Journal of Applied Psychology 79 (1994), 87--97.

[25]

Tromp, J., Bullock, A., Steed, A., Sadagic, A., Slater, M., and Frecon, E. Small Group Behaviour Experiments in the COVEN Project. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 18, 6 (1998), 53--63.

Digital Library

[26]

Vertegaal, R., Slagter, R., Van der Veer, G., and Nijholt, A. Eye Gaze patterns in Conversations: There is More to Conversational Agents than Meets the Eyes, in Proceedings of CHI'01: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Seattle, WA, 2001), 301--307.

Digital Library

[27]

Watson, D. and Friend, R. Measurement of social-evaluative anxiety. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 33 (1969), 448--457.

Cited By

Brännström JWaechter SNirme JWhitling SLyberg-Åhlander VSahlén B(2024)Developing a teacher agent to explore the role of gaze direction on young school children’s comprehensionActa Logopaedica10.58986/al.2024.139721(23-31)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.58986/al.2024.13972
Aziz SLohr DFriedman LKomogortsev O(2024)Evaluation of Eye Tracking Signal Quality for Virtual Reality Applications: A Case Study in the Meta Quest ProProceedings of the 2024 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications10.1145/3649902.3653347(1-8)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649902.3653347
Dembinsky DWatanabe KDengel AIshimaru S(2024)Eye Movement in a Controlled Dialogue SettingProceedings of the 2024 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications10.1145/3649902.3653337(1-7)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649902.3653337
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

The impact of avatar realism and eye gaze control on perceived quality of communication in a shared immersive virtual environment

Recommendations

The impact of eye gaze on communication using humanoid avatars
CHI '01: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

In this paper we describe an experiment designed to investigate the importance of eye gaze in humanoid avatar's representing people engaged in conversation. We compare responses to dyadic conversations in four mediated conditions: video, audio-only, and ...
Read More
The effect of avatar realism in immersive social virtual realities
VRST '17: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology

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 ...
Read More
Eye-tracking for avatar eye-gaze and interactional analysis in immersive collaborative virtual environments
CSCW '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work

Participants' eye-gaze is generally not captured or represented in immersive collaborative virtual environment (ICVE) systems. We present EyeCVE, which uses mobile eye-trackers to drive the gaze of each participant's virtual avatar, thus supporting ...
Read More

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '03: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2003

620 pages

ISBN:1581136307

DOI:10.1145/642611

Conference Chairs:
Gilbert Cockton
University of Sunderland, UK
,
Panu Korhonen
Nokia Research Center, Finland

Copyright © 2003 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 05 April 2003

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

CHI03

Sponsor:

CHI03: Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 5 - 10, 2003

Florida, Ft. Lauderdale, USA

Acceptance Rates

CHI '03 Paper Acceptance Rate 75 of 468 submissions, 16%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

Upcoming Conference

CHI PLAY '24

Sponsor:
sigchi

The Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play

October 14 - 17, 2024

Tampere , Finland

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

258
Total Citations
View Citations
5,143
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)329
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)45

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Brännström JWaechter SNirme JWhitling SLyberg-Åhlander VSahlén B(2024)Developing a teacher agent to explore the role of gaze direction on young school children’s comprehensionActa Logopaedica10.58986/al.2024.139721(23-31)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.58986/al.2024.13972
Aziz SLohr DFriedman LKomogortsev O(2024)Evaluation of Eye Tracking Signal Quality for Virtual Reality Applications: A Case Study in the Meta Quest ProProceedings of the 2024 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications10.1145/3649902.3653347(1-8)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649902.3653347
Dembinsky DWatanabe KDengel AIshimaru S(2024)Eye Movement in a Controlled Dialogue SettingProceedings of the 2024 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications10.1145/3649902.3653337(1-7)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649902.3653337
Mal DWolf EDöllinger NBotsch MWienrich CLatoschik M(2024)From 2D-Screens to VR: Exploring the Effect of Immersion on the Plausibility of Virtual HumansExtended Abstracts of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650773(1-8)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613905.3650773
Zojaji SMatviienko ALeite IPeters C(2024)Join Me Here if You Will: Investigating Embodiment and Politeness Behaviors When Joining Small Groups of Humans, Robots, and Virtual CharactersProceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642905(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642905
Mello BWelsch RVerbokkem MKnierim PDechant M(2024)Navigating the Virtual Gaze: Social Anxiety's Role in VR ProxemicsProceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642359(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642359
Rekik RWuhrer SHoyet LZibrek KOlivier A(2024)A Survey on Realistic Virtual Human Animations: Definitions, Features and EvaluationsComputer Graphics Forum10.1111/cgf.1506443:2Online publication date: 30-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.15064
Sasikumar PHajika RGupta KGunasekaran TPai YBai HNanayakkara SBillinghurst M(2024)A User Study on Sharing Physiological Cues in VR Assembly Tasks2024 IEEE Conference Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR)10.1109/VR58804.2024.00096(765-773)Online publication date: 16-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/VR58804.2024.00096
Wilson EIbragimov AProulx MTetali SButler KJain E(2024)Privacy-Preserving Gaze Data Streaming in Immersive Interactive Virtual Reality: Robustness and User ExperienceIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2024.337203230:5(2257-2268)Online publication date: May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2024.3372032
Mulvaney PRooney BFriehs MLeader J(2024)Social VR design features and experiential outcomes: narrative review and relationship map for dyadic agent conversationsVirtual Reality10.1007/s10055-024-00941-028:1Online publication date: 22-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10055-024-00941-0
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents