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.

Immersive virtual environment technology (IVET) allows developers to create simulated environments that can engage users in context relevant behaviors and that can produce relatively intense user experiences for purposes such as entertainment (e.g., video games), phobia desensitization, and training. We predicted that playing a violent video game using an IVET platform would lead to increased presence and aggressive feelings and behavior compared to playing on a less immersive desktop platform. The results of two experiments supported this hypothesis. The data suggest that presence mediated the relationship between playing platform and aggressive feelings but not the relationship between playing platform and aggressive behavior. Finally, we explored the utility of using cardiovascular measures within this research paradigm.

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.

We assessed the utility of using immersive virtual environment (IVE) technology for social psychological research by attempting to replicate two classic social influence effects. Specifically, we sought to replicate the classic social facilitation/inhibition effects wherein individuals' performance on a task is affected by the presence of others. Within an IVE, participants mastered one of two tasks and subsequently performed the mastered or nonmastered task either alone or in the presence of a virtual human audience whom they were led to believe were either computer-controlled agents or human-controlled avatars. Those performing in the presence of avatars demonstrated classic social inhibition performance impairment effects relative to those performing alone or in the presence of agents. We discuss important elements involved in the experience of social influence within immersive virtual environments.

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.