Social virtual reality (VR), by definition, focuses on people using networked VR systems to bring avatars together. Previous studies have examined how different factors affect social interaction, in small groups such as dyads or triads. However, in a typical social VR scene there tends to be dozens of avatars, even those not directly interacting with a given user. Furthermore, beyond the virtual environment, VR users are also situated in various immediate physical social contexts. In two field experiments, we investigate how the presence of virtual and physical people contextualize and influence nonverbal behaviors. Study 1 examines virtual context and asks how interacting with others in a private or public virtual environment influences nonverbal outcomes during interactions in a social VR platform. Across two sessions, participants ( n = 104) met either in a private virtual environment with their group members alone or in a public environment surrounded by four other groups. Results showed that participants moved their avatars slower and stood closer to group members in public versus private environments. Study 2 examines physical context and asks how interacting with virtual others while physically together or alone influences nonverbal behaviors. Participants ( n = 61) met in virtual environments while they were in either a shared physical environment or separated physical environments. Results showed that, compared to remote participants, participants who were physically together moved their bodies more slowly, but their avatars faster. Moreover, there was more mutual gaze among remote participants. We discuss implications to theories of social influence in VR.

Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs), wherein people can virtually interact with each other via avatars, are becoming increasingly prominent. However, CVEs differ in type of avatar representation and level of behavioral realism afforded to users. The present investigation compared the effect of behavioral realism on users' nonverbal behavior, self-presence, social presence, and interpersonal attraction during a dyadic interaction. Fifty-one dyads (aged 18 to 26) embodied either a full-bodied avatar with mapped hands and inferred arm movements, an avatar consisting of only a floating head and mapped hands, or a static full-bodied avatar. Planned contrasts compared the effect of behavioral realism against no behavioral realism, and compared the effect of low versus high behavioral realism. Results show that participants who embodied the avatar with only a floating head and hands experienced greater social presence, self-presence, and interpersonal attraction than participants who embodied a full-bodied avatar with mapped hands. In contrast, there were no significant differences on these measures between participants in the two mapped-hands conditions and those who embodied a static avatar. Participants in the static-avatar condition rotated their own physical head and hands significantly less than participants in the other two conditions during the dyadic interaction. Additionally, side-to-side head movements were negatively correlated with interpersonal attraction regardless of condition. We discuss implications of the finding that behavioral realism influences nonverbal behavior and communication outcomes.

Olfactory research in immersive virtual environments (IVEs) have often examined the addition of scent as part of the environment or atmosphere that act as experimental stimuli. There appears to be a lack of research on the influence of virtual foods in IVEs on human satiation. Studies based on situational cues or self-perception theory provide support for the hypothesis that touching and smelling a virtual food item may lead to increased consumption as a result of modeling expected behavior. On the other hand, studies grounded in embodied cognition suggest that satiation may take place as a result of mental simulation that resembles actual consumption behavior. In this preliminary study, we sought to explore the effects of haptic and olfactory cues through virtual food on human satiation and eating behavior. In our study, 101 participants took part in a 2 (touch: present vs absent) × 2 (scent: present vs absent) experiment where they interacted with a donut in an IVE. Findings showed that participants in the touch and scent present conditions ate significantly fewer donuts than those who were not exposed to these cues, and reported higher satiation as compared to their counterparts. However, findings were less clear with respect to participants who received both haptic and olfactory cues. As a whole, results provide preliminary support for satiation effects as a result of sensory simulation.

Can an avatar’s body movements change a person’s perception of good and bad? We discuss virtual embodiment according to theories of embodied cognition (EC), and afferent and sensorimotor correspondences. We present an example study using virtual reality (VR) to test EC theory, testing the effect of altered virtual embodiment on perception. Participants either controlled an avatar whose arm movements were similar to their own or reflected the mirror opposite of their arm movements. We measured their associations of “good” and “bad” with the left and right (i.e., space-valence associations). This study demonstrated how VR could be used to examine the possible ways that systems of the body (e.g., visual, motor) may interact to influence cognition. The implications of this research suggest that visual feedback alone is not enough to alter space-valence associations. Multiple sensory experiences of media (i.e., sensorimotor feedback) may be necessary to influence cognition, not simply visual feedback.

Recent research on immersive virtual environments has shown that users can not only inhabit and identify with novel avatars with novel body extensions, but also learn to control novel appendages in ways beneficial to the task at hand. But how different control schemas might affect task performance and body ownership with novel avatar appendages has yet to be explored. In this article, we discuss the design of control schemas based on the theory and practice of 3D interactions applied to novel avatar bodies. Using a within-subjects design, we compare the effects of controlling a third arm with three different control schemas (bimanual, unimanual, and head-control) on task performance, simulator sickness, presence, and user preference. Both the unimanual and the head-control were significantly faster, elicited significantly higher body ownership, and were preferred over the bimanual control schema. Participants felt that the bimanual control was significantly more difficult than the unimanual control, and elicited less appendage agency than the head-control. There were no differences in reported simulator sickness. We discuss the implications of these results for interface design.

Novel avatar bodies are ones that are not controlled in a one-to-one relationship between the user’s body and the avatar body, for example, when the avatar’s arms are controlled by the user’s legs, or, when the avatar has a third arm. People have been shown to complete tasks more successfully when controlling novel avatar bodies than when controlling avatars that conform to the normal human configurations, when those novel avatars are better suited to the task (Won, Bailenson, Lee, & Lanier, 2015). However, the novel avatars in such studies tend to follow two conventions. First, the novel avatars still resemble biological forms, and second, the novel extensions of the avatar are connected to the avatar body. In the following study, participants operated bodies with three arms. We examined the interaction between biological appearance of the third arm and whether it was attached to the body. There was a significant effect of biological appearance on performance, such that participants inhabiting an avatar with a biological appearance did worse overall. There was also an interaction with biological appearance and an extension that appeared detached from the participant’s body such that participants in this condition performed most poorly overall. We propose a relationship between self-reported presence and task success, and discuss the implications of these findings for the design, implementation, and use of novel avatars.

The current study tracked 80 participants who spent an average of six hours per week in Second Life over six consecutive weeks. Objective measures of movement and chat were automatically collected in real time when participants logged in to Second Life. Data regarding the number of groups and friends was self-reported through online questionnaires on a weekly basis. Results demonstrated that although the social networks of users continued to broaden over the course of the study, users became less inclined to explore regions, decreased their use of high-energy actions such as flying or running, and chatted less. We discuss implications for theories of virtual social interaction as well as the use of Second Life as a social science research platform.

Immersive collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) allow us to interact with geographically distant others while experiencing social presence to a degree that goes far beyond text chatting or teleconferencing. Moreover, these environments provide this high level of realism within social contexts that are impossible in the physical world. Given these facts, CVEs provide behavioral researchers with an ideal platform to study social interaction both within and between geographically and culturally distinct communities. The study reported here leveraged these two unique capabilities of CVEs within a persuasive context by: (1) placing people who are seated in physically distal places into the exact same virtual world, and (2) structuring virtual space to maximize persuasion. Specifically, we report data from a study in which pairs of participants listened to a speaker deliver a persuasive passage within the same digital immersive virtual room. The individual members of each pair were separated by hundreds of kilometers, located at two different college campuses. Within the CVE, we digitally transformed the placement of participants' seats in the virtual classroom. Participants in the front of the classroom were more persuaded by the speaker and had more positive impressions of the speaker. Patterns in both persuasion and memory differed between campuses. Together these findings speak to the utility of wide range CVEs to maximize persuasion and demonstrate the viability of using CVEs for inter-site research.

The current study investigated the value of using immersive virtual environment technology as a tool for assessing eyewitness identification. Participants witnessed a staged crime and then examined sequential lineups within immersive virtual environments that contained 3D virtual busts of the suspect and six distractors. Participants either had unlimited viewpoints of the busts in terms of angle and distance, or a unitary view at only a single angle and distance. Furthermore, participants either were allowed to choose the angle and distance of the viewpoints they received, or were given viewpoints without choice. Results demonstrated that unlimited viewpoints improved accuracy in suspect-present lineups but not in suspect-absent lineups. Furthermore, across conditions, post-hoc measurements demonstrated that when the chosen view of the suspect during the lineup was similar to the view during the staged crime in terms of distance, accuracy improved. Finally, participants were more accurate in suspect-absent lineups than in suspect-present lineups. Implications of the findings in terms of theories of eyewitness testimony are discussed, as well as the value of using virtual lineups that elicit high levels of presence in the field. We conclude that digital avatars of higher fidelity may be necessary before actually implementing virtual lineups.

Empirical research on human behavior in collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) is in its infancy. Historically, one of the more valuable tools social scientists have used to evaluate new forms of media is longitudinal studies that examine user behavior over an extended period of time. In the current study, three triads of participants came to the lab for 15 sessions over a ten week period to collaborate for approximately 45 minutes per session. We examined nonverbal behavior, task performance on verbal tasks, and subjective ratings of presence, copresence, simulator sickness, and entitativity over time. Furthermore, we examined two types of transformed social interaction: nonverbal mimicry and facial similarity. Results demonstrated substantial changes in task performance, subjective ratings, nonverbal behavior, and simulator sickness over time as participants became familiar with the system. Furthermore, transforming avatar appearance to increase facial similarity sometimes improved task performance. We discuss implications for research on CVEs.

The realism of avatars in terms of behavior and form is critical to the development of collaborative virtual environments. In the study we utilized state of the art, real-time face tracking technology to track and render facial expressions unobtrusively in a desktop CVE. Participants in dyads interacted with each other via either a video-conference (high behavioral realism and high form realism), voice only (low behavioral realism and low form realism), or an “emotibox” that rendered the dimensions of facial expressions abstractly in terms of color, shape, and orientation on a rectangular polygon (high behavioral realism and low form realism). Verbal and non-verbal self-disclosure were lowest in the videoconference condition while self-reported copresence and success of transmission and identification of emotions were lowest in the emotibox condition. Previous work demonstrates that avatar realism increases copresence while decreasing self-disclosure. We discuss the possibility of a hybrid realism solution that maintains high copresence without lowering self-disclosure, and the benefits of such an avatar on applications such as distance learning and therapy.

The current study examined how assessments of copresence in an immersive virtual environment are influenced by variations in how much an embodied agent resembles a human being in appearance and behavior. We measured the extent to which virtual representations were both perceived and treated as if they were human via self-report, behavioral, and cognitive dependent measures. Distinctive patterns of findings emerged with respect to the behavior and appearance of embodied agents depending on the definition and operationalization of copresence. Independent and interactive effects for appearance and behavior were found suggesting that assessing the impact of behavioral realism on copresence without taking into account the appearance of the embodied agent (and vice versa) can lead to misleading conclusions. Consistent with the results of previous research, copresence was lowest when there was a large mismatch between the appearance and behavioral realism of an embodied agent.

Computer-mediated communication systems known as collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) allow geographically separated individuals to interact verbally and nonverbally in a shared virtual space in real time. We discuss a CVE-based research paradigm that transforms (i.e., filters and modifies) nonverbal behaviors during social interaction. Because the technology underlying CVEs allows a strategic decoupling of rendered behavior from the actual behavior of the interactants, conceptual and perceptual constraints inherent in face-to-face interaction need not apply. Decoupling algorithms can enhance or degrade facets of nonverbal behavior within CVEs, such that interactants can reap the benefits of nonverbal enhancement or suffer nonverbal degradation. Concepts underlying transformed social interaction (TSI), the ethics and implications of such a research paradigm, and data from a pilot study examining TSI are discussed.

We examined the effectiveness of using 3D, visual, digital representations of human heads and faces (i.e., virtual busts) for person identification. In a series of 11 studies, participants learned a number of human faces from analog photographs. We then crafted virtual busts from those analog photographs, and compared recognition of photographs of the virtual busts to the original analog photographs. We demonstrated that the accuracy of person identification using photographs of virtual busts is high in an absolute sense, but not as high as using the original analog photographs. We present a paradigm for comparing the similarity, both structural (objectively similar in shape) and subjective (subjectively in the eyes of a viewer) of virtual busts to analog photographs, with the goal of beginning the discussion of a uniform standard for assessing the fidelity of digital models of human faces.

During the last half of the twentieth century, psychologists and anthropologists have studied proxemics, or spacing behavior, among people in many contexts. As we enter the twenty-first century, immersive virtual environment technology promises new experimental venues in which researchers can study proxemics. Immersive virtual environments provide realistic and compelling experimental settings without sacrificing experimental control. The experiment reported here tested Argyle and Dean's (1965) equilibrium theory's specification of an inverse relationship between mutual gaze, a nonverbal cue signaling intimacy, and interpersonal distance. Participants were immersed in a three-dimensional virtual room in which a virtual human representation (that is, an embodied agent) stood. Under the guise of a memory task, participants walked towards and around the agent. Distance between the participant and agent was tracked automatically via our immersive virtual environment system. All participants maintained more space around agents than they did around similarly sized and shaped but nonhuman-like objects. Female participants maintained more interpersonal distance between themselves and agents who engaged them in eye contact (that is, mutual gaze behavior) than between themselves and agents who did not engage them in eye contact, whereas male participants did not. Implications are discussed for the study of proxemics via immersive virtual environment technology, as well as the design of virtual environments and virtual humans.