Zheleva Aleksandra, Hardeman Julie, Durnez Wouter, Vanroelen Charlotte, De Bruyne Jonas, Tutu Dennis Osei, Morton Jessica, Joundi Jamil, Saldien Jelle, Bombeke Klaas
imec-mict-UGent, Department of Communication Sciences, Ghent University, 9000, Belgium.
Department of Experimental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Ghent University, 9000, Belgium.
Heliyon. 2023 Oct 5;9(10):e20165. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e20165. eCollection 2023 Oct.
The introduction of the Metaverse and the rise of social virtual reality platforms such as VRChat has led to increased communication and collaboration in virtual reality. As interactions in social virtual reality take place through avatars, the behaviour, and in particular the eye gaze of an avatar can have an impact on the user experience. However, it is still unclear which features of the user experience are most influenced. Therefore, this study used data from 44 female participants to investigate how avatar gaze behaviour (static eyes vs. real-time tracked eyes) affects their perceived quality of communication and the amount of one-sided eye contact participants make during a communicative or collaborative task in virtual reality. In addition, the study investigated the mediating role of perceived avatar "uncanniness" (i.e., the finding that humanoid objects that imperfectly resemble real people evoke feelings of discomfort) in this relationship and the moderation effect of two multi-user scenarios (collaboration vs. communication). The results showed that uncanniness directly affected the perceived quality of communication. However, it did not significantly mediate the relationship between avatar eye gaze behaviour and the quality of communication or the amount of one-sided eye contact. Finally, there were no significant differences in user experience between the two scenarios. From this, we can conclude that the uncanniness of an avatar being interacted with in VR is not enough to hinder communication and collaboration in an immersive medium. And even if an avatar is perceived as uncanny, normative communication cues such as eye contact are still present. Notably, due to sample availability, the results of this study are based on a female-only sample. Thus, future research can benefit from exploring the outlined effects in a more gender-balanced sample.
元宇宙的引入以及VRChat等社交虚拟现实平台的兴起，使得虚拟现实中的交流与协作有所增加。由于社交虚拟现实中的互动是通过虚拟化身进行的，因此虚拟化身的行为，尤其是其眼神注视，会对用户体验产生影响。然而，目前仍不清楚用户体验的哪些特征受到的影响最大。因此，本研究使用了44名女性参与者的数据，来调查虚拟化身的注视行为（静态眼睛与实时跟踪眼睛）如何影响她们在虚拟现实中的交流任务或协作任务期间感知到的交流质量，以及参与者进行单边眼神接触的次数。此外，该研究还调查了感知到的虚拟化身“怪异感”（即发现与真实人类不太相似的类人对象会引发不适感）在这种关系中的中介作用，以及两种多用户场景（协作与交流）的调节作用。结果表明，怪异感直接影响了感知到的交流质量。然而，它并没有显著中介虚拟化身眼神注视行为与交流质量或单边眼神接触次数之间的关系。最后，两种场景下的用户体验没有显著差异。由此我们可以得出结论，在虚拟现实中与虚拟化身互动时产生的怪异感不足以阻碍沉浸式媒介中的交流与协作。而且，即使一个虚拟化身被认为是怪异的，诸如眼神接触等规范的交流线索仍然存在。值得注意的是，由于样本可得性，本研究的结果基于一个仅包含女性的样本。因此，未来的研究可以通过在更具性别平衡性的样本中探索上述效应而受益。
