Avatar-driven self-disclosure: The virtual me is the actual me

Considering the importance of self-disclosure in building relationships and bonds, it is vital to investigate how self-disclosure is affected by avatars utilized in many online communities. In this study, we tested a research model that explores how perceived avatar-self similarity affects self-disclosure via different theoretical constructs such as self-awareness, self-presence, and identifiability. The research model was empirically tested with data from a web-based survey of 209 Second Life users. Results revealed that avatar similarity impacts self-disclosure but with varying effects, depending on how it is mediated by variables of identifiability, self-awareness and self-presence. Specifically, appearance similarity affects homophily, which heightens self-awareness. This results in increased feelings of self-presence, which positively affects self-disclosure. Homophily also has the effect of heightening perceptions of identifiability, which decreases self-disclosure. Implications and applications are discussed.     

Impact of similarity between avatar and their users on their perceived identifiability: Evidence from virtual teams in Second Life platform

Research on the application of avatars in the virtual teams is growing. In this study, we examined the effect of perceived similarity of an avatar user with his/her avatar on the perceptions of his/her identifiability within a virtual team. The study utilized a sample of 124 users actively involved in Second Life, a virtual world platform. Results of structural equation modeling utilizing the partial least squares method corroborate the hypothesis. An important contribution of this research is to inform practitioners about the critical role that users’ similarity with the avatar plays in enhancing their identifiability. We draw conclusions based on the result and identify some important avenues for future research.     

Understanding emotional bond between the creator and the avatar: Change in behavioral intentions to engage in alcohol-related traffic risk behaviors

This study examines the joint impact of an individual's relationship with his or her avatar and negative consequences to the avatar on changing the individual's behavioral intentions (BI) in terms of alcohol-impaired driving. One hundred eleven participants volunteered to participate in several experimental conditions where the degree of choice of avatar features and the degree of control of the avatar's actions were manipulated in Second Life, an immersive 3D virtual environment. Participants who were allowed to customize their avatars viewed their avatars not only more similar but also emotionally closer to themselves, and perceived their avatars to be physically more attractive than those who were assigned basic avatars. After observing a car crash caused by drunk driving, participants in the choice and control condition were more likely to change BI positively when they identified their avatars to be similar to themselves, and regarded their avatars more attractive. Furthermore, participants who were allowed to control their avatars were more likely to attribute the responsibility of the car accident to themselves than those who observed someone else's avatar playing. Implications for the use of virtual reality games in promoting healthy behaviors are discussed in detail.     

The psychological functions of avatars and alt(s): A qualitative study

Prior research has shown that approximately 50% of active participants in the 3D virtual world of Second Life have one or more secondary avatars or “alts” in addition to their primary avatar. Thus, these individuals are operating a “multiple or poly-identity system” composed of a physical self, a primary avatar, and one or more alts. However, little is known about the functions these virtual identities serve for the virtual-world user. The current study involved qualitative analysis of semistructured interviews with Second Life participants (N = 24) who had a primary avatar and at least one alt. Interviews were coded to examine the functions that primary avatars and alts served. Eight functions—seven suggested by previous research on virtual world identity and one that emerged from analyses—were reflected in a large majority of the transcribed interviews and are described in the article. The current findings add to our understanding of how multifaceted identity systems operate, as more individuals augment their physical self with a set of virtual identities.     

I Am What I See: How Avatar and Opponent Agent Body Size Affects Physical Activity Among Men Playing Exergames

This study examined how avatar body size (normal, obese) and opponent character body size (normal, obese) influenced physical activity while male participants played an exergame. Males operating normal weight avatars showed more physical activity than those using obese avatars. Perceived avatar and opponent character body‐size differences moderated the effect of avatar appearance on physical activity. Participants showed decreased physical activity when the opponent character was perceived as slightly more obese than their avatar. Participants also showed decreased physical activity when their avatar was perceived as more obese than the opponent character. We discuss theoretical implications and applications of using virtual characters to increase gamers' physical activity. These findings are also compared to an earlier study with an all‐female sample.     

Me,myself and I: The role of interactional context on self-presentation through avatars

This paper investigates whether the nature of an online environment can prime users to create avatars that emphasize particular characteristics. Participants created an avatar for one of three contrasting settings: blogging, dating or gaming. For the most part, avatars in blogging were created to accurately reflect their owners’ physical appearance, lifestyle and preferences. By contrast, participants in the dating and gaming treatments accentuated certain aspects of their avatar to reflect the tone and perceived expectations of the context. For instance, avatars in dating were made to look more attractive while avatars in gaming were made to look more intellectual. Yet, predominantly, these emphasized avatar attributes drew on participants’ self-image, and thus avatars were perceived by their owners as highly similar to themselves. The implications of these results are discussed against current frameworks of online identity and behavior. Most importantly, we use our results to extract design recommendations for improving avatar-driven applications.     

Investigating user experience in Second Life for collaborative learning

Two studies on collaborative learning in Second Life are reported. The first is an ecological study of Second Life used in an undergraduate class, by observation, interviews, and limit surveys. Use of Second Life motivated students with good user experience, although they viewed it as a games technology. Second Life was used to prepare virtual meetings and presentations but not for online discussion, with Blackboard and especially Facebook providing collaborative support. In the second experimental study, the effectiveness and user experience with Second Life and Blackboard were compared, including a face-to-face control condition. There were no performance differences overall, although face-to-face was quicker and was preferred by users, followed by Blackboard and Second Life. Blackboard was perceived to be more usable, whereas Second Life provided a better user experience. Worst performance was indicated by dislike of avatar interaction in Second Life, and poor user experience in Blackboard, whereas better performance was associated with engagement with avatars, and better usability in Blackboard. The results of both studies are reviewed using Salmon's model for online learning, suggesting that Second Life helped motivation and socialisation stages, although integration with other technologies is necessary for knowledge construction. Preliminary guidelines are proposed for configuration and management of Second Life in collaborative learning. The affordances for collaboration in virtual worlds are discussed, with reflections on user experience and functional support provided by Second Life, as an exemplar of a virtual world for collaborative learning support.     

Gaze interaction with virtual on-line communities: levelling the playing field for disabled users

This paper introduces the concept of enabling gaze-based interaction for users with high-level motor disabilities to control an avatar in a first-person perspective on-line community. An example community, Second Life, is introduced that could offer disabled users the same virtual freedom as any other user, and so allow disabled users to be able-bodied (should they wish) within the virtual world. A survey of the control demands for Second Life and a subsequent preliminary experiment show that gaze control has inherent problems particularly for locomotion and camera movement. These problems result in a lack of effective gaze control of Second Life, such that control is not practical and show that disabled users who interact using gaze will have difficulties in controlling Second Life (and similar environments). This suggests that these users could once again become disabled in the virtual world by the difficulties in effectively controlling their avatars, and their ‘disability privacy’, or the right to control an avatar as effectively as an able bodied user, and so appear virtually able bodied, will be compromised. Methods for overcoming these difficulties such as the use of gaze aware on-screen assistive tools could overcome these problems, but games manufacturers must design inclusively, so that disabled users may have the right to disability privacy in their Second (virtual) Lives.     

Fully Embodied Conversational Avatars: Making Communicative Behaviors Autonomous

Although avatars may resemble communicative interface agents, they have for the most part not profited from recent research into autonomous embodied conversational systems. In particular, even though avatars function within conversational environments (for example, chat or games), and even though they often resemble humans (with a head, hands, and a body) they are incapable of representing the kinds of knowledge that humans have about how to use the body during communication. Humans, however, do make extensive use of the visual channel for interaction management where many subtle and even involuntary cues are read from stance, gaze, and gesture. We argue that the modeling and animation of such fundamental behavior is crucial for the credibility and effectiveness of the virtual interaction in chat. By treating the avatar as a communicative agent, we propose a method to automate the animation of important communicative behavior, deriving from work in conversation and discourse theory. BodyChat is a system that allows users to communicate via text while their avatars automatically animate attention, salutations, turn taking, back-channel feedback, and facial expression. An evaluation shows that users found an avatar with autonomous conversational behaviors to be more natural than avatars whose behaviors they controlled, and to increase the perceived expressiveness of the conversation. Interestingly, users also felt that avatars with autonomous communicative behaviors provided a greater sense of user control.     

Exploring the Effect of Avatar Trust on Learners’ Perceived Participation Intentions in an e-Learning Environment

With continued advancements in Web technology, e-learning systems have emerged as an effective venue in which learners can interact with online contents and they are often equipped with avatar instructors in lieu of human instructors. In this case, avatar trust, the learners’ perceived trust in the avatar instructor, plays an important role in learners’ perceived intentions to participate in the e-learning activities. We assumed that social presence positively affects participation intention (PI) through avatar trust. The main purpose of this study is to empirically validate this hypothesis. Using two types of avatars as a moderating factor, our hypothesis was tested against 200 valid questionnaires. We found that social presence had a statistically significant influence on perceived PI through avatar trust, and that an attractive avatar type sheds stronger moderating effect on paths between social presence and avatar trust, and path between trust and participation than does an expert avatar type.     

Player see,player do: Testing an exergame motivation model based on the influence of the self avatar

While the benefits of physically immersive video games, or exergames, have witnessed much research attention, less is known about the psychosocial processes that enable exergames to be an effective digital tool. An increasing number of exergames feature in-game graphical representations (avatars) of players and, and research shows that these avatars have the potential to influence self-perceptions. This study proposes an exergame motivation model based on the Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) that explores the impact of avatars on exergame players. The SCT suggests that individuals can learn through an enactive experience, and exergames appear to offer this form of learning through the presence of the player's in-game graphical representation (self avatar). 322 participants played an exergame for six sessions that feature self avatars. Structural equation modeling (SEM) results showed a good fit for the proposed exergame motivation model. Through the presence and behavior of the player's self avatar, the player learns by experiencing for himself/herself the results and consequences of his/her behavior within the exergame as he/she identifies with the character. Enjoyment was also found to partially mediate the relationship between identification with the avatar and exergame intention. The proposed exergame motivation model is likely to contribute to a deeper understanding of avatar and exergame effects and inform future research on health gaming interventions.     

Avatar-mediated creativity: When embodying inventors makes engineers more creative

An important challenge today is to support creativity while enabling geographically distant people to work together. In line with the componential theory of creativity, self-perception theory and recent research on the Proteus Effect, we investigate how avatars, which are virtual representations of the self, may be a medium for stimulating creativity. For this purpose, we conducted two studies with a population of engineering students. In the first study, 114 participants responded to online surveys in order to identify what a creative avatar may look like. This enabled us to select avatars representing inventors, which were perceived as creative by engineering students, and neutral avatars. In the second study, 54 participants brainstormed in groups of 3, in 3 different conditions: in a control face-to-face situation, in a virtual environment while embodying neutral avatars and in a virtual environment with inventor avatars. The results show that inventor avatars led to higher performance in fluency and originality of ideas. Moreover, this benefit proved to endure over time since participants allocated to inventor avatars also performed better in a subsequent face-to-face brainstorming. The prospects of using avatars for enhancing creativity-relevant processes are discussed in terms of theoretical and applicative implications.     

Virtual shopping and unconscious persuasion: The priming effects of avatar age and consumers’ age discrimination on purchasing and prosocial behaviors

This study examined how operating elderly or young avatars affected shoppers’ product perceptions and purchasing behaviors. It also investigated how virtual shopping experiences translated into prosocial behavior regarding a nonprofit organization supporting the elderly. Operating elderly avatars influenced shoppers’ product choice and walking speed while shopping compared to operating younger avatars. In addition, operating elderly avatars positively affected participants’ attitudes and willingness to donate to and volunteer for a nonprofit organization supporting the elderly. Statistical interactions between avatar age and a shopper’s ageism on behavioral and persuasion outcomes were also confirmed, and these findings implied an assimilation/contrast effect influenced by a shopper’s preexisting prejudices toward the elderly.     

Virtual research assistants: Replacing human interviewers by automated avatars in virtual worlds

We conducted an experiment to evaluate the use of embodied survey bots (i.e., software-controlled avatars) as a novel method for automated data collection in 3D virtual worlds. A bot and a human-controlled avatar carried out a survey interview within the virtual world, Second Life, asking participants about their religion. In addition to interviewer agency (bot vs. human), we tested participants’ virtual age, that is, the time passed since the person behind the avatar joined Second Life, as a predictor for response rate and quality. The human interviewer achieved a higher response rate than the bot. Participants with younger avatars were more willing to disclose information about their real life than those with older avatars. Surprisingly, the human interviewer received more negative responses than the bot. Affective reactions of older avatars were also more negative than those of younger avatars. The findings provide support for the utility of bots as virtual research assistants but raise ethical questions that need to be considered carefully.     

The impact of avatar realism and anonymity on effective communication via mobile devices

This research investigates the impact on social communication quality of using anonymous avatars during small-screen mobile audio/visual communications. Elements of behavioral and visual realism of avatars are defined, as is an elaborated three-component measure of communication quality called Social Copresence. Experimental results with 196 participants participating in a social interaction using a simulated mobile device with varied levels of avatar visual and behavioral realism showed higher levels of avatar Kinetic Conformity and Fidelity produced increased perceived Social Richness of Medium, while higher avatar Anthropomorphism produced higher levels of Psychological Copresence and Interactant Satisfaction with Communication. Increased levels of avatar Anonymity produced decreases in Social Copresence, but these were smaller when avatars possessed higher levels of visual and behavioral realism.     

The visual characteristics of avatars in computer-mediated communication: Comparison of Internet Relay Chat and Instant Messenger as of 2003

This research focuses on computer-mediated communication where users are represented by a graphical avatar. An avatar represents a user's self-identity and desire for self-disclosure. Therefore, the claim is made that there is a relationship between the characteristics of media and the choice of avatar. This study supports the claim by examining the difference between Internet Relay Chat (IRC) avatars and Instant Messenger (IM) avatars as of 2003 when both media had distinct characteristics and popular avatar service in Korea. Users of IRC are generally anonymous and involved with topic-based group discussions, whereas users of IM are known by their “real” names and communicate via one-on-one chitchatting. We found that avatars as symbols for users can have different characteristics in terms of self-identity and self-disclosure in different media. Gender is found to have significant moderation effect on avatar usage, whereas age is shown to have a mixed moderation effect.     

Avatars in social media: Balancing accuracy,playfulness and embodied messages

This paper examines how users negotiate their self-presentation via an avatar used in social media. Twenty participants customised an avatar while thinking aloud. An analysis of this verbal data revealed three motivating factors that drive self-presentation: (1) avatars were used to accurately reflect their owners’ offline self; participants chose to display stable self-attributes or idealised their avatar by concealing or emphasising attributes aligned to imagined social roles, (2) the diversity of customisation options was exploited by some participants who broke free from the social rules governing self-presentation offline; others used the avatar's appearance to emotionally provoke and engage the avatar viewer and finally, (3) avatars were used as proxies; participants designed their online self in order to convey a message to a significant other.     

An Exploration of Why People Participate in Second Life Social Support Groups

The present study investigates why people participate in Second Life social support groups. Twenty‐three participants in Alcoholics Anonymous and Cancer Caregiver groups that meet in Second Life were interviewed and asked how satisfied they are with those meetings, what influences their satisfaction, what they find most helpful, what they like the least, the nature of their relationships in the group, and what surprised them the most. Their responses identify the text‐based anonymity, nearly synchronous communication, visual representation of avatars, and use of time and virtual space as influences that stimulate hyperpersonal relationship development in their Second Life social support groups.     

Choose your “buddy icon” carefully: The influence of avatar androgyny, anthropomorphism and credibility in online interactions

In both online and offline interactions, the visual representation of people influences how others perceive them. In contrast to the offline body, an online visual representation of a person is consciously chosen and not stable. This paper reports the results of a 2 step examination of the influence of avatars on the person perception process. Specifically, this project examines the reliance on visual characteristics during the online perception process, and the relative influence of androgyny, anthropomorphism and credibility. In the first step, 255 participants fill out a survey where they rated a set of 30 static avatars on their credibility, androgyny, and anthropomorphism. The second step is a between subjects experiment with 230 participants who interact with partners represented by one of eight avatars (high and low androgyny, and anthropomorphism by high and low credibility). Results show that the characteristics of the avatar are used in the person perception process. Causal modeling techniques revealed that perceptions of avatar androgyny influence perceptions of anthropomorphism, which influences attributions of both avatar and partner credibility. Implications of these results for theory, future research, and users and designers of systems using avatars are discussed.     

Avatar mobility in user-created networked virtual worlds: measurements, analysis, and implications

We collected mobility traces of avatars spanning multiple regions in Second Life, a popular user-created virtual world. We analyzed the traces to characterize the dynamics of the avatars’ mobility and behavior, both temporally and spatially. We discuss the implications of our findings on the design of peer-to-peer architecture, interest management, mobility modeling of avatars, server load balancing and zone partitioning, caching, and prefetching for user-created virtual worlds.