| Description |
Animated avatars are becoming increasingly prevalent in three-dimensional virtual environments due to modern motion tracking hardware and their falling cost. As this opens up new possibilities and ways of interaction within such virtual worlds, an important question that arises is how does the presence of an avatar alter the perception and performance of an action in a virtual environment when a user interacts with an object in the virtual environment through their avatar. This research attempts to answer this question by studying the effects of presence of an animated self-avatar in an object manipulation task in a virtual environment. Two experiments were conducted as part of this research. In Experiment 1, the feasibility of an interaction system involving animated self-avatars to manipulate objects in a virtual environment was examined. It was observed that the presence of self-avatars had an affect on the performance of a subset of subjects. Male subjects with gaming experience performed similarly across both visual feedback conditions while female subjects who also had low gaming experience performed better in the condition with avatar feedback than in the condition without avatar feedback. In Experiment 2, we further analyzed the effect of presence of self-avatar visual feedback by looking at the effect of visual immersion in the virtual environment, task difficulty, and individual difference factors such as spatial ability and gaming experience. It was observed that difficult trials were completed significantly faster by subjects in the avatar feedback condition while in the case of the easy trials, there was no significant difference between performance of subjects in the avatar and sphere feedback conditions. No significant interaction was observed between visual feedback condition and either immersiveness or individual difference factors. |
