Capability at a Glance: Design Guidelines for Intuitive Avatars Communicating Augmented Actions in Virtual Reality

TL;DR

This paper develops and validates design guidelines for creating intuitive avatars in VR that effectively communicate capabilities and interactions, enhancing user understanding and engagement.

Contribution

It introduces a set of 16 practical guidelines for avatar design in VR, grounded in expert input and validated through user studies.

Findings

Guidelines significantly improved avatar intuitiveness

Participants rated guidelines as clear and useful

External judges confirmed better communication of capabilities

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) enables users to engage with capabilities beyond human limitations, but it is not always obvious how to trigger these capabilities. Taking the lens of Affordance, we believe avatar design is the key to solving this issue, which ideally should communicate its capabilities and how to activate them. To understand the current practice, we selected eight capabilities across four categories and invited twelve professional designers to design avatars that communicate the capabilities and their corresponding interactions. From the resulting designs, we formed 16 guidelines to provide general and category-specific recommendations. Then, we validated these guidelines by letting two groups of twelve participants design avatars with and without guidelines. Participants rated the guidelines' clarity and usefulness highly. External judges confirmed that avatars designed with the guidelines were more intuitive in conveying the capabilities and interaction methods. Finally, we demonstrated the applicability of the guidelines in avatar design for four VR applications.