Aliens versus Humans: Do Avatars Make a Difference in How We Play the Game?

Abstract

an immersive first-person 3D computer game was designed and developed to investigate if the visual characteristics of a player's avatar influences their behavior. Two types of gender-matched biped avatar were used: Normal looking Humanoids and tougher looking Aliens. In the game, players had to block incoming projectiles fired from two canons with their hands. The number of times the players were hit as well as a measure of how hard they hit the projectiles was recorded. Results show differences in these measures dependent on the type of avatar used, in line with previous findings whereby people appear to be influenced by the perceived characteristics of their digital representation.

Visual Perception and Evaluation of Photo-Realistic Self-Avatars From 3D Body Scans in Males and Females

“…The results suggest that it may be important for many virtual reality applications that aim to convey and transfer spatial information from the virtual world to the real world to provide a personalized avatar in terms of size. Avatars are used in various applications and research fields such as health care (Stevens et al, 2006;Combs et al, 2015), education (Hayes et al, 2013), tele-communication (Slater and Steed, 2002;Garau et al, 2003;Bailenson et al, 2006;Biocca, 2014), immersive games (Christou and Michael, 2014), virtual clothes try on and animation of realistic clothing (Magnenat-Thalmann et al, 2011;Guan et al, 2012;Pons-Moll et al, 2017), design processes (Sherman and Craig, 2002), and ergonomics (Badler, 1997;Honglun et al, 2007).…”

Iteratively Adapting Avatars using Task-Integrated Optimisation

“…We explore the approach in two target-selection tasks; earlier work on avatars that differ from users' real bodies have also used target selection [6,37]. In a first study, we evaluate our approach by adapting avatar forearm length for a 3D tapping task.…”

“…For instance, embodying a taller avatar increases self-confidence during a negotiation [39]. Christou and Michael [6] focused on the effect of appearance and body ownership on performance. They used realistic humanoid avatars with two different textures.…”

“…One large attraction of Virtual Reality (VR) is that its users can embody avatars that differ from their bodies. For example, people can experience ownership of avatar bodies of different appearances [6,39], with extra limbs [37], or elongated arms [7,13]. Changes to the avatar may also increase the user's performance in interactive tasks [37].…”

Gaming for safer sex

“…Participants in the conditions with multiple gaming sessions were asked to log in to their account to start the next session, where they could continue at the same level they had reached when they stopped playing at the end of a previous session. Having created an account, participants were asked to build their own avatar in order to increase their engagement in the game (Birk, Atkins, Bowey, & Mandryk, 2016;Christou & Michael, 2014;Lindgren, 2013). We decided that this would be beneficial even though it has been shown that a participant's input on game aesthetics has only a limited influence on its effectiveness (DeSmet et al, 2016).…”