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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…
Telepresence VR systems allow for face-to-face communication, promoting the feeling of presence and understanding of nonverbal cues. However, when discussing virtual 3D objects, limitations to presence and communication cause deictic…
The usage of virtual avatars in healthcare applications has become widely popular; however, certain critical aspects, such as social distancing and avatar size, remain insufficiently explored. This research investigates user experience and…
The Metaverse is redefining digital interactions by merging physical, virtual, and social dimensions, yet its effects on social networking remain largely unexplored. This work examines the role of independent avatars (autonomous digital…
Augmented Reality (AR) teleconferencing allows separately located users to interact with each other in 3D through agents in their own physical environments. Existing methods leveraging volumetric capturing and reconstruction can provide a…
AI-based tools that mediate, enhance or generate parts of video communication may interfere with how people evaluate trustworthiness and credibility. In two preregistered online experiments (N = 2,000), we examined whether AI-mediated video…
In this paper, we introduce a concept called ''virtual co-embodiment'', which enables a user to share their virtual avatar with another entity (e.g., another user, robot, or autonomous agent). We describe a proof-of-concept in which two…
The application of Virtual Reality Environments (VRE) has been gaining momentum as a relatively new tool to assist with mitigating various difficulties including abstractness of concepts, lack of user engagement, perception of disconnection…
This study explores human perceptions of intelligent agents by comparing interactions with a humanoid robot and a virtual human avatar, both utilizing GPT-3 for response generation. The study aims to understand how physical and virtual…
In this paper we explore the potential of utilizing Virtual Reality (VR) as a therapeutic tool for supporting individuals in the LGBTQ+ community, who often face elevated risks of mental health issues. Specifically, we investigated the…
Virtual avatars offer new opportunities to reshape communication experiences beyond traditional live video. However, it remains unclear how avatar representations influence communication anxiety for English as a Second Language (ESL)…
Virtual humans play a pivotal role in social virtual environments, shaping users' VR experiences. The diversity in available options and users' preferences can result in a heterogeneous mix of appearances among a group of virtual humans.…
An increasing number of online interaction settings now provide the possibility to visually represent oneself via an animated avatar instead of a video stream. Benefits include protecting the communicator's privacy while still providing a…
Clinical psychology students frequently report feeling underprepared for the interpersonal demands of therapeutic work, highlighting the need for accessible opportunities to practise core counselling skills before seeing real clients.…
Human-robot studies are expensive to conduct and difficult to control, and as such researchers sometimes turn to human-avatar interaction in the hope of faster and cheaper data collection that can be transferred to the robot domain. In…
Recently, there has been growing interest in investigating the effects of self-representation on user experience and perception in virtual environments. However, few studies investigated the effects of levels of body representation…
Experiential learning has been known to be an engaging and effective modality for personal and professional development. The Metaverse provides ample opportunities for the creation of environments in which such experiential learning can…
Mobile video calls are widely used to share information about real-world objects and environments with remote collaborators. While these calls provide valuable visual context in real time, the experience of interacting with people and…
Photorealistic avatars are human avatars that look, move, and talk like real people. The performance of photorealistic avatars has significantly improved recently based on objective metrics such as PSNR, SSIM, LPIPS, FID, and FVD. However,…
Social VR enables people to interact over distance with others in real-time. It allows remote people, typically represented as avatars, to communicate and perform activities together in a join shared virtual environment, extending the…