Sending an Avatar to Do a Human’s Job: Compliance with Authority Persists Despite the Uncanny Valley

Just as physical appearance affects social influence in human communication, it may also affect the processing of advice conveyed through avatars, computer-animated characters, and other human-like interfaces. Although the most persuasive computer interfaces are often the most human-like, they have been predicted to incur the greatest risk of falling into the uncanny valley, the loss of empathy attributed to characters that appear eerily human. Previous studies compared interfaces on the left side of the uncanny valley, namely, those with low human likeness. To examine interfaces with higher human realism, a between-groups factorial experiment was conducted through the internet with 426 midwestern U.S. undergraduates. This experiment presented a hypothetical ethical dilemma followed by the advice of an authority figure. The authority was manipulated in three ways: depiction (digitally recorded or computer animated), motion quality (smooth or jerky), and advice (disclose or refrain from disclosing sensitive information). Of these, only the advice changed opinion about the ethical dilemma, even though the animated depiction was significantly eerier than the human depiction. These results indicate that compliance with an authority persists even when using an uncannily realistic computer-animated double

A 3D virtual environment for social telepresence

We examine OnLive Traveler as a case study. Traveler is a clientserver application allowing real-time synchronous communication between individuals over the Internet. The Traveler client interface presents the user with a shared virtual 3D world, in which participants are represented by avatars. The primary mode of communication is through multi-point, full duplex voice, managed by the server. Our design goal was to develop a virtual community system that emulates natural social paradigms, allowing the participants to sense a tele-presence, the subjective sensation that remote users are actually co-located within a virtual space. Once this level of immersive "sense of presence" and engagement is achieved, we believe an enhanced level of socialization, learning, and communication are achievable. We examine a number of very specific design and implementation decisions that were made to achieve this goal within platform constraints. We also will detail some observed results gleaned from the virtual community userbase, which has been online for several year

A computer based system to design expressive avatars

Avatars are used in different contexts and situations: e-commerce, e-therapy, virtual worlds, videogames,collaborative online design... In this context, a good design of an avatar may improve the user experience. The ability of controlling the way an avatar convey messages and emotions is capital. In this work, a procedure to design avatar faces capable of conveying to the observer the most suitable sensations according to a given context is developed. The proposed system is based on a combination of genetic algorithms and artificial neural networks whose training is based on perceptual human responses to a set of faces.Diego-Mas, JA.; Alcaide Marzal, J. (2015). A computer based system to design expressive avatars. Computers in Human Behavior. 44:1-11. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2014.11.027S1114

Virtual Worlds: Social Interactions Among Online Gamers Through Voice Chat

Online gaming scholarship has rarely focused on the micro sociological aspects of virtual worlds as much of the research on online games is undertaken by psychologists and scholars in other fields. When a sociological lens is employed in analyzing social interactions that occur in virtual worlds, new understandings of social phenomena in virtual worlds can come to light. My research draws upon multiple sociological theories to make sense of data collect via in-depth interviews and participant observations in an attempt to understand how voice chat influences relationship formation and maintenance, gender relations among online gamers, and how online gamers use the label noob to regulate gamer masculinity in virtual worlds. Findings indicate the voice chat has a both a positive and negative impact on the social interactions of online gamers