Impact of Avatar Anthropomorphism and Task Type on Social Presence in Immersive Collaborative Virtual Environments

Eliciting a sense of social presence is necessary to create believable multi-user situations in immersive virtual environments. To be able to collaborate in virtual worlds, users are represented by avatars (virtual characters controlled in real time) allowing them to interact with each other. We report a study investigating the impact on social presence of both non-human avatars’ facial properties and of the type of collaborative task being performed by the users (asymmetric collaboration versus negotiation). While we observed no significant impact of facial properties, both co-presence and perceived message understanding scores were significantly higher during the negotiation task.