Selective Fidelity: Investigating Priorities for the Creation of Expressive Avatars

Garau, Maia

doi:10.1007/1-4020-3898-4_2

Cited by 28 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Garau (2006), for example, has shown that people are more responsive to and experience a higher level of copresence when interacting with behaviorally more responsive agents (agents that display human-like behaviors) in immersive environments. She also showed that people are more responsive to and perceive the quality of communication as being improved when interacting with an inferred eye gaze avatar (an avatar for which a life-like eye gaze is generated using a computer program) than with a random eye gaze avatar in a variety of conditions (seeing the avatar on a screen, and in an immersive virtual environment).…”

Section: Findings About Copresence In Svesmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Thus we could ask a similar question about, for example, one's online instant messaging contacts as can be asked about the number of avatars with whom we shared the same space in SVEs: namely, if there are more copresent participants, does their copresence become diluted? Another question that can be compared here is whether copresence is enhanced by having an image of the user: How does copresence vary with the realism of the user representation (Garau, 2006)?…”

Section: Comparing Copresencementioning

confidence: 99%

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Being There Together and the Future of Connected Presence

Schroeder

2006

Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments

102

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Research on virtual environments has provided insights into the experience of presence (or being there) and copresence (being there together). Several dimensions of this experience, including the realism of the environment and of the avatar embodiment, have been investigated. At the same time, research on a number of new media has begun to use concepts that are similar to copresence-such as mutual awareness, connected presence, and engagement. Since digital environments can be reconfigured and combined easily, and since an increasing number of such environments are used to connect people in their everyday lives, it is useful to think about the various modalities of connected presence as a continuum-with shared virtual environments in which people are fully immersed as an end-state. This paper proposes a model for the different modalities of connected presence whereby research on shared virtual environments can be modeled as approaching this end-state. It is argued that this model can improve our understanding both of the uses of shared virtual environments and of their future development among a variety of media for "being there together." This paves the way for integrating research on shared virtual environments with research on other new media.

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Section: Findings About Copresence In Svesmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Comparing Copresencementioning

confidence: 99%

Being There Together and the Future of Connected Presence

Schroeder

2006

Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments

102

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“…In general, the main functions of avatars in virtual environments are identification (e.g., who is tutor, who is learner) and interaction support (see Fig. 4, Allmendinger, 2005;Garau, 2006). To ensure easy identification in working and learning contexts, avatars resembling the user, and name tags displayed near the avatars, are often used (e.g., Allmendinger, 2005;Peterson, 2006).…”

Section: Social Presence In Cvesmentioning

confidence: 98%

Social Presence in Synchronous Virtual Learning Situations: The Role of Nonverbal Signals Displayed by Avatars

Allmendinger¹

2010

Educ Psychol Rev

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Social factors play an important role in determining whether instructional communication in computer-supported settings will be successful. Social presence is a social factor, specifically addressing the feeling of being present with another person in a virtual environment. This article describes possibilities to influence the feeling of social presence in synchronous learning scenarios using desktop collaborative virtual environments (CVEs). Desktop CVEs are technically simple compared with immersive CVEs and can be adapted according to the needs of the users. In this article, possible adaptations are described using the example of the desktop CVE virtual team room. In CVEs, users are represented as avatars. Avatars may or may not convey nonverbal signals. The focus of the article is on whether the actual use of nonverbal signals can affect the sense of social presence and thus help to establish and maintain the learner's motivation and provide support for structuring social interaction in learning situations. The paper provides a review of exploratory studies and experiments as well as a report on the author's own studies. Future research questions concerning learning in CVEs are discussed.Keywords Nonverbal signal . Avatar . Social presence . Collaborative virtual environments . Synchronous online learning Over the last decade, the concept of learning as an interactive and collaborative process has gained attention (Gulz and Haake, 2006). The perspective that learning is a fundamentally social phenomenon is reflected in the steadily growing research area of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL;Stahl, 2006). This article focuses on synchronous CSCL scenarios, also known as real-time or online learning scenarios. CSCL scenarios give rise to new challenges in terms of mutually constructing "meaning", establishing and maintaining the user's motivation, as well as structuring social interaction in learning situations

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“…Animated characters and even the computer interface itself can generate strong automatic social responses from minimal social cues. Social responses to computer characters for example, are generated even though the user is quite aware that the computer is not an emotional or social agent but a machine" [58]. They later state that "a fundamental question in mediated social presence is why humans respond automatically and socially to virtual representations of other beings" .…”

Section: Exploring the Impact Of Minimal Fidelitymentioning

confidence: 99%