In a new study, researchers at Stanford University have explored how the ability to completely change a person’s appearance and digital environment significantly impacts social interactions in the Metaverse.
In the field of virtual reality (VR), users can completely change their appearance in the form of avatars and digital environments at the touch of a button. In a groundbreaking new study, Stanford researchers are exploring how this unique and profound ability dramatically impacts social interactions in the metaverse — a term for immersive virtual worlds experienced through virtual reality headsets — as more and more people gather here to play and work.
When participants were in an “open” virtual environment surrounded by “nature”, they reported that the experience was more rejuvenating and more enjoyable than in an “indoor” virtual environment.
“In the virtual world, you can be anyone, anywhere,” said study lead author Yugi Khan, a communications doctoral student who is being advised by Jeremy Beilenson, Thomas More Storke Professor at the Stanford School of Arts and Sciences. “The current work we report in this study suggests that who you are and where you are is important for learning, collaboration, communication, and other activities in the metaverse.”
The study, published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communications, is the latest in the Stanford Innovative Virtual Humans course. Taught by Beilenson and colleagues, this class is the first ever to be taught in virtual reality and is one of the largest.
In the study, 272 students used virtual reality headsets to meet in a virtual environment for 30 minutes once a week for eight weeks. During these courses, students participated in two experiments, accumulating hundreds of thousands of minutes of interaction for analysis by researchers.
The experiment assessed the impact of the student’s location in various digital environments. Another experiment assessed the impact of who students are on how they present themselves as avatars.
In virtual environment labs, students interact in confined or spacious virtual environments, both indoors and outdoors. Researchers have created 192 unique environments with features ranging from compact train cars to vast indoor arenas, walled gardens and endless fields.
In open virtual spaces, both indoors and outdoors, students demonstrated greater non-verbal synchrony and reported an increase in a number of positive measures such as group cohesion, enjoyment, arousal, presence, and enjoyment. elements evoked more positive emotions, regardless of the apparent size of the virtual space. “Where you are in the metaverse can have a big impact on your experience and the overall experience of your team,” Khan said. “Large, open, panoramic spaces for people to move around really make group behavior easier.”
Thus, the results show that people can take advantage of the greatness of virtual reality by choosing a large open environment rather than recreating a cramped conference room or lecture hall.
“Collaboration at its core is about people interacting productively with each other and responding to each other, and our data shows that when you expand virtual rooms to be larger than traditional office spaces, all of these important follow-up things are happening,” Beilenson said.
In another experiment, students interacted virtually with each other in the form of virtual avatars that resembled the appearance of students in the real physical world, or as regular avatars that looked and dressed the same. The researchers observed the behavior of students in virtual reality, who reported how they felt in terms of team cohesion, presence, fun, and realism.
The study found that when presented with avatars that looked like themselves, students demonstrated greater non-verbal synchrony, meaning their gestures and postures were similar to each other. Consistent with these observations, students reported that they felt more “in sync” with themselves and with each other when they teamed up in self-avatars. When presented as a normal avatar and thus effectively “not themselves”, students reported that the experience was fun and liberating. “People like ordinary avatars, devoid of any identity,” Khan said. “On the other hand, when students imagined themselves as avatars, they felt more alive and involved.”
A key takeaway from these results is that for more productive and collaborative interactions—for example, in the workplace or for professional purposes—autoavatars are preferred. “When you’re serious about the metaverse, you want to look like you,” said Bailenson, founding director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Laboratory (VHIL) and co-author of the study.
Importantly, both experiments showed that the reported benefits of virtual interaction with a specific avatar and specific environment increased over time. These results show that the effects of VR are long-term, and not just isolated positive virtual reality experiences, Beilenson said.
The study also demonstrates the potential of virtual reality as a new and insightful medium for psychological research due to its unlimited digital possibilities and low cost compared to physical world alternatives.
“In the history of the social sciences, there has been very little research on the psychological impact of large spaces, for obvious reasons, such as renting Madison Square Garden for a meeting of four people is very expensive,” Bailenson says. “But in virtual reality, the cost disappears, and one of the most striking findings of our study is that large indoor spaces have many of the same compensatory psychological values as outdoors.”
Other co-authors of the Stanford study are graduate students Cyan DeVoe, Hanseul June and Mark Miller, Jeffrey Hancock, Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication, and Neelam Ram, Professor of Communication and Psychology (Nelam Ram).
Bailenson is also a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Environment Institute, a member of Stanford Bio-X, a member of the Wu Tsai Human Performance Consortium, a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Environment Institute, and a member of the Wu Tsai Institute of Neurology. Hancock is also a member of Stanford Bio-X and an affiliate faculty member of the Human Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute (HAI).
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Post time: Jan-11-2023