Context-based representation of avatar visibility and style to support social presence in mixed reality remote collaboration

Abstract

This research proposes a context-based remote avatar design framework to support social presence and collaboration effectiveness when representing a remote user's avatar by adjusting the factors of Body Visibility and Style in Mixed Reality (MR) remote collaboration. For this purpose, this research evaluates and analyzes users' social presence, subjective perception, and collaboration effectiveness on differently represented remote avatars while performing collaborative tasks designed based on different contextual factors through three consecutive user studies. As a main independent variable, the factor of avatar representation is divided into visibility and style factors, and each level is adjusted based on the degrees of realism. The factor of visibility is investigated through the first and third studies regarding partial body representation and overall body transparency. The second style factor has levels ranging from an unrealistic to realistic expression and is verified in the first and second studies. At the same time, since this research aims at MR remote collaboration situations, the user's environmental context is also set as an additional experimental variable, which has two conditions in Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) to compare and analyze overall telepresence experience during a simultaneously connected collaboration situation. Lastly, by assuming different collaboration tasks conducted in the three user experiments, how different experiences are created according to each context will be further investigated, and it will also be reflected in developing the context-based framework. Through the user-oriented research and the three-phase analysis, this research comprehensively discusses and establishes: 1) the principles of the remote avatar design tailored to the context of collaboration, 2) the role of the avatar body as a vital collaboration element and a non-verbal cue, and 3) the meaning of realism in the style of the avatar representation. Ultimately, based on this, this research suggests a framework for context-based avatar visibility and style design, which supports a level of social presence and experience similar to collaboration in reality through adaptive remote avatar representation suited to various MR remote collaboration situations, thereby improving the user's overall telepresence experience.