Don't stand so close to me: investigating the effect of control on the appeal of virtual humans using immersion and a proximity-based behavioral task

In recent years, there has been much research and media attention devoted to investigating virtual reality environments. In this paper, we are investigating if there are differences in how characters are perceived in immersive virtual reality as opposed to more common, screen-based environments. We were particularly interested if the spatial and immersive components play an important part in perception of interactive, game-like settings, where characters can either be controlled (avatars) or observed (agents). We focus on the subjective reports on perceived realism, affinity, co-presence and agency. Since appearance of the character is an important component of affinity, we introduced the changes in render style, ranging in three realism levels, to test if appearance would even further influence the perception in relation to control condition and platform. Furthermore, we adapted a behavioural method (proximity task) as a novel approach to establishing if behavioural changes could be recorded based on the introduced conditions and compared those values with the subjective reports of the participants. The conclusions have an important value to character design specific to platform and character control.

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