Virtual Avatar Movement Veracity and its Effect on Social Interaction in Virtual Reality

The market for Virtual Reality (VR) products is growing rapidly, and we expect an important use case will be social interaction. This work contributes to the understanding of how social interaction and connection are impacted by how closely a user's real-life physical motion is tied to the motion of their virtual character, an “avatar.” We observed social interaction between 16 pairs of participants (32 participants in total) controlling VR avatars over four different movement conditions in a within-subjects experimental setup: directly-captured (movement directly captured from VR headset and hand controllers), predictive (a mixture of directly captured movement and predicted synthetic movement), synthetic (movement entirely based on pre-generated animations), and a static control group. Two key metrics were analyzed to gauge social connection: expressivity and engagement, with a significant effect of avatar movement condition on expressivity measures. The findings of this study suggest that users feel that they are best able to express themselves and that the expressions of others are best communicated when VR avatars feature a mixture of directly-captured and predictive synthetic movement. We also use this experiment to present a methodology that could be used for exploring other similar questions in VR.