Effect of Avatar Facial Expressiveness on Team Collaboration in Virtual Reality
Hugo Le Tarnec, Elisabetta Bevacqua, Olivier Augereau, Pierre De Loor
Abstract
This paper investigates the impact of displaying the facial expressions of a user in real time on the performance of the task, the social presence and the behavioral changes of the users interacting in a Virtual Reality environment. To evaluate this approach, we conducted a study where the users collaborated to build a TV stand in dyad including a novice and an expert assistant. The collaborative task was divided into two independent phases: a face-to-face discussion phase without object manipulation, and a furniture assembly phase with object manipulation. Our results indicate that the proposed approach can increase social presence and lead to gaze behavior changes in multi-user environments during the face-to-face phase.