Are We in This Together? Investigating the Relationship of Avatar Customisation, Social Presence, and Communication Outcomes in Collaborative Embodied Virtual Reality
Full citation (APA): Macey, A. L., Bujić, M., Belousov, A., Kerous, B., Järvelä, S., & Hamari, J. (2025). Are We in This Together? Investigating the Relationship of Avatar Customisation, Social Presence, and Communication Outcomes in Collaborative Embodied Virtual Reality. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 9(7), 1-20.
Abstract: Social virtual reality (VR) enables embodied interactions with others within 3D environments. There has been a growing amount of research on avatar appearance and its influence on social presence and user behaviour, including communicative outcomes. As the focus has often been on the effects of avatar-related intrapersonal processes, it would be necessary to shed more light on the influence of interpersonal processes behind dynamic avatar-mediated interaction. This research aimed to investigate the effects of avatar customisation on social presence and perceived relational messages during a collaborative puzzle task in immersive social VR. The strictly controlled between-subject laboratory experiment (N = 50) with two body-tracked avatar conditions (Custom vs. Assigned) was conducted. Results do not indicate that avatar customisation has a significant effect on social presence or relational communication in the collaborative task-related context. However, it is worth noting that participants in both conditions presented markedly high social presence scores and rated partners' relational messages positively, which might have introduced a ceiling effect diminishing any potential difference in social presence between the conditions.
