The Work Avatar Face-Off: Knowledge Worker Preferences for Realism in Meetings

While avatars have grown in popularity in social settings, their use in the workplace is still debatable. We conducted a large-scale survey to evaluate knowledge worker sentiment towards avatars, particularly the effects of realism on their acceptability for work meetings. Our survey of 2509 knowledge workers from multiple countries rated five avatar styles for use by managers, known colleagues and unknown colleagues. In all scenarios, participants favored higher realism, but fully realistic avatars were sometimes perceived as uncanny. Less realistic avatars were rated worse when interacting with an unknown colleague or manager, as compared to a known colleague. Avatar acceptability varied by country, with participants from the United States and South Korea rating avatars more favorably. We supplemented our quantitative findings with a thematic analysis of open-ended responses to provide a comprehensive understanding of factors influencing work avatar choices. In conclusion, our results show that realism had a significant positive correlation with acceptability. Non-realistic avatars were seen as fun and playful, but only suitable for occasional use.Comment: 10 pages, accepted at ISMAR 2023 conferenc

The uncanny valley of haptics

During teleoperation and virtual reality experiences, enhanced haptic feedback incongruent with other sensory cues can reduce subjective realism, producing an uncanny valley of haptics

Avatar Embodiment. Towards a Standardized Questionnaire

Inside virtual reality, users can embody avatars that are collocated from a first-person perspective. When doing so, participants have the feeling that the own body has been substituted by the self-avatar, and that the new body is the source of the sensations. Embodiment is complex as it includes not only body ownership over the avatar, but also agency, co-location, and external appearance. Despite the multiple variables that influence it, the illusion is quite robust, and it can be produced even if the self-avatar is of a different age, size, gender, or race from the participant's own body. Embodiment illusions are therefore the basis for many social VR experiences and a current active research area among the community. Researchers are interested both in the body manipulations that can be accepted, as well as studying how different self-avatars produce different attitudinal, social, perceptual, and behavioral effects. However, findings suggest that despite embodiment being strongly associated with the performance and reactions inside virtual reality, the extent to which the illusion is experienced varies between participants. In this paper, we review the questionnaires used in past experiments and propose a standardized embodiment questionnaire based on 25 questions that are prevalent in the literature. We encourage future virtual reality experiments that include first-person virtual avatars to administer this questionnaire in order to evaluate the degree of embodiment

Diffuse, Attend, and Segment: Unsupervised Zero-Shot Segmentation using Stable Diffusion

Producing quality segmentation masks for images is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Recent research has explored large-scale supervised training to enable zero-shot segmentation on virtually any image style and unsupervised training to enable segmentation without dense annotations. However, constructing a model capable of segmenting anything in a zero-shot manner without any annotations is still challenging. In this paper, we propose to utilize the self-attention layers in stable diffusion models to achieve this goal because the pre-trained stable diffusion model has learned inherent concepts of objects within its attention layers. Specifically, we introduce a simple yet effective iterative merging process based on measuring KL divergence among attention maps to merge them into valid segmentation masks. The proposed method does not require any training or language dependency to extract quality segmentation for any images. On COCO-Stuff-27, our method surpasses the prior unsupervised zero-shot SOTA method by an absolute 26% in pixel accuracy and 17% in mean IoU. The project page is at \url{https://sites.google.com/view/diffseg/home}

VALID: A perceptually validated Virtual Avatar Library for Inclusion and Diversity

As consumer adoption of immersive technologies grows, virtual avatars will play a prominent role in the future of social computing. However, as people begin to interact more frequently through virtual avatars, it is important to ensure that the research community has validated tools to evaluate the effects and consequences of such technologies. We present the first iteration of a new, freely available 3D avatar library called the Virtual Avatar Library for Inclusion and Diversity (VALID), which includes 210 fully rigged avatars with a focus on advancing racial diversity and inclusion. We present a detailed process for creating, iterating, and validating avatars of diversity. Through a large online study (n=132) with participants from 33 countries, we provide statistically validated labels for each avatar's perceived race and gender. Through our validation study, we also advance knowledge pertaining to the perception of an avatar's race. In particular, we found that avatars of some races were more accurately identified by participants of the same race

Design Principles and Challenges for Gaze + Pinch Interaction in XR

For Extended Reality (XR) headsets, a key aim is the natural interaction in 3-D space beyond what traditional methods of keyboard, mouse, and touchscreen can offer. With the release of the Apple Vision Pro, a novel interaction paradigm is now widely available where users seamlessly navigate content through the combined use of their eyes and hands. However, blending these modalities poses unique design challenges due to their dynamic nature and the absence of established principles and standards. In this article, we present five design principles and issues for the Gaze + Pinch interaction technique, informed by eye-hand research in the human–computer interaction field. The design principles encompass mechanisms like division of labor and minimalistic timing, which are crucial for usability, alongside enhancements for the manipulation of objects, indirect interactions, and drag & drop. Whether in design, technology, or research domains, this exploration offers valuable perspectives for navigating the evolving landscape of 3-D interaction

The uncanny valley of haptics

During teleoperation and virtual reality experiences, enhanced haptic feedback incongruent with other sensory cues can reduce subjective realism, producing an uncanny valley of haptics