Designing the Organizational Metaverse for Effective Socialization

The metaverse is a virtual world that merges physical, virtual, and augmented reality, enabling collaboration between online users and offering limitless opportunities for connectivity and integration. While the metaverse has gained significant attention in organizations, it presents social challenges as organizations have unprecedented insight and influence over individuals\u27 thoughts and beliefs. Our review is based on a theoretical framework and examines the impact of the environment, collaboration, avatars, and individual behavior on organizational socialization. We develop a conceptual model for the socialization process in the metaverse, contributing to a deep understanding of this emerging field and providing a research agenda for future work

Implications of the uncanny valley of avatars and virtual characters for human-computer interaction

Technological innovations made it possible to create more and more realistic figures. Such figures are often created according to human appearance and behavior allowing interaction with artificial systems in a natural and familiar way. In 1970, the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori observed, however, that robots and prostheses with a very - but not perfect - human-like appearance can elicit eerie, uncomfortable, and even repulsive feelings. While real people or stylized figures do not seem to evoke such negative feelings, human depictions with only minor imperfections fall into the "uncanny valley," as Mori put it. Today, further innovations in computer graphics led virtual characters into the uncanny valley. Thus, they have been subject of a number of disciplines. For research, virtual characters created by computer graphics are particularly interesting as they are easy to manipulate and, thus, can significantly contribute to a better understanding of the uncanny valley and human perception. For designers and developers of virtual characters such as in animated movies or games, it is important to understand how the appearance and human-likeness or virtual realism influence the experience and interaction of the user and how they can create believable and acceptable avatars and virtual characters despite the uncanny valley. This work investigates these aspects and is the next step in the exploration of the uncanny valley. This dissertation presents the results of nine studies examining the effects of the uncanny valley on human perception, how it affects interaction with computing systems, which cognitive processes are involved, and which causes may be responsible for the phenomenon. Furthermore, we examine not only methods for avoiding uncanny or unpleasant effects but also the preferred characteristics of virtual faces. We bring the uncanny valley into context with related phenomena causing similar effects. By exploring the eeriness of virtual animals, we found evidence that the uncanny valley is not only related to the dimension of human-likeness, which significantly change our view on the phenomenon. Furthermore, using advanced hand tracking and virtual reality technologies, we discovered that avatar realism is connected to other factors, which are related to the uncanny valley and depend on avatar realism. Affinity with the virtual ego and the feeling of presence in the virtual world were also affected by gender and deviating body structures such as a reduced number of fingers. Considering the performance while typing on keyboards in virtual reality, we also found that the perception of the own avatar depends on the user's individual task proficiencies. This thesis concludes with implications that not only extends existing knowledge about virtual characters, avatars and the uncanny valley but also provide new design guidelines for human-computer interaction and virtual reality

At the fringes of normality – a neurocognitive model of the uncanny valley on the detection and negative evaluation of deviations

Information violating preconceived patterns tend to be disliked. The term “uncanny valley” is used to described such negative reactions towards near humanlike artificial agents as a nonlinear function of human likeness and likability. My work proposes and investigates a new neurocognitive theory of the uncanny valley and uncanniness effects within various categories. According to this refined theory of the uncanny valley, the degree of perceptual specialization increases the sensitivity to anomalies or deviations in a stimulus, which leads to a greater relative negative evaluation. As perceptual specialization is observed for many human-related stimuli (e.g., faces, voices, bodies, biological motion) attempts to replicate artificial human entities may lead to design errors which would be especially apparent due to a higher level of specialization, leading to the uncanny valley. The refined theory is established and investigated throughout 10 chapters. In Chapters 2 to 4, the correlative (Chapters 2 and 3) and causal (Chapter 4) association between perceptual specialization, sensitivity to deviations, and uncanniness are observed. In Chapters 5 to 6, the refined theory is applied to inanimate object categories to validate its relevance in stimulus categories beyond those associated with the uncanny valley, specifically written text (Chapter 5) and physical places (Chapter 6). Chapters 7 to 10 critically investigate multiple explanations on the uncanny valley, including the refined theory. Chapter 11 applies the refined theory onto ecologically valid stimuli of the uncanny valley, namely an android’s dynamic emotional expressions. Finally, Chapter 12 summarized and discusses the findings and evaluates the refined theory of the uncanny based on its advantages and disadvantages. With this work, I hope to present substantial arguments for an alternative, refined theory of the uncanny that can more accurately explain a wider range of observation compared to the uncanny valley