Beyond Replication:
Augmenting Social Behaviors in Multi-User Virtual Realities
Proceedings of the 25th IEEE Virtual Reality (VR) conference, page 215-222. (2018)Abstract
This paper presents a novel approach for the augmentation of social
behaviors in virtual reality (VR). We designed three visual
transformations for behavioral phenomena crucial to everyday social
interactions: eye contact, joint attention, and grouping. To
evaluate the approach, we let users interact socially in a virtual museum
using a large-scale multi-user tracking environment. Using
a between-subject design (N = 125) we formed groups of five participants.
Participants were represented as simplified avatars and
experienced the virtual museum simultaneously, either with or without
the augmentations. Our results indicate that our approach can
significantly increase social presence in multi-user environments
and that the augmented experience appears more thought-provoking.
Furthermore, the augmentations seem also to affect the actual behavior
of participants with regard to more eye contact and more focus
on avatars/objects in the scene. We interpret these findings as first
indicators for the potential of social augmentations to impact social
perception and behavior in VR.
