Social presence and place illusion are affected by photorealism in embodied VR

Photorealism of virtual characters and environments is becoming more achievable in Virtual Reality (VR). With this development comes the need for further investigation into the role it plays on people’s responses to characters. Whether or not these improvements make any difference to the perception and response towards the virtual character was the central question of the present study. In order to evaluate this, we designed a within-subjects experiment, where participants were embodied in a high-fidelity virtual body in VR and were observing an animated character, rendered in photorealistic and simplified style. The character displayed a simple interactive behaviour with the participant (eye-gaze) and was designed to express an emotional reaction to induce an empathetic response in participants. Our goal was to evaluate if photorealism alone is enough to increase self-reported and behavioural signs (interpersonal distance or proximity) of social presence, place illusion, and empathetic concern for the character in virtual reality. This was found to be the case for self-reported social presence and place illusion, while empathetic concern depended on the order of condition. behavioural measure proximity was not affected by render style.

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