Effects of Realism and Representation on Self-Embodied Avatars in Immersive Virtual Environments

TL;DR

This study examines how different levels of realism and perspectives of self-embodied avatars in VR affect user experience, spatial awareness, and presence during natural tasks like walking and obstacle avoidance.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of first and third-person perspectives with three avatar realism levels, offering guidelines for self-embodied VR application design.

Findings

Realistic avatars enhance presence but may induce uncanny valley effects.

Third-person perspective can improve spatial awareness in VR.

Different avatar representations influence navigation and reflex-based task performance.

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) has recently gained traction with many new and ever more affordable devices being released. The increase in popularity of this paradigm of interaction has given birth to new applications and has attracted casual consumers to experience VR. Providing a self-embodied representation (avatar) of users' full bodies inside shared virtual spaces can improve the VR experience and make it more engaging to both new and experienced users . This is especially important in fully immersive systems, where the equipment completely occludes the real world making self awareness problematic. Indeed, the feeling of presence of the user is highly influenced by their virtual representations, even though small flaws could lead to uncanny valley side-effects. Following previous research, we would like to assess whether using a third-person perspective could also benefit the VR experience, via an improved spatial awareness of the user's virtual surroundings. In this paper we investigate realism and perspective of self-embodied representation in VR setups in natural tasks, such as walking and avoiding obstacles. We compare both First and Third-Person perspectives with three different levels of realism in avatar representation. These range from a stylized abstract avatar, to a "realistic" mesh-based humanoid representation and a point-cloud rendering. The latter uses data captured via depth-sensors and mapped into a virtual self inside the Virtual Environment. We present a throughout evaluation and comparison of these different representations, describing a series of guidelines for self-embodied VR applications. The effects of the uncanny valley are also discussed in the context of navigation and reflex-based tasks.