Investigating the Effect of Animal Avatars on Users' Self-disclosure During Interaction in VR space

Abstract

In social VR, users can communicate with others by expressing their own appearance by customizing an avatar. Several studies have shown that the appearance of the avatars that users use in social VR affects their self-disclosure. In this study, motivated by the findings of previous studies that interaction with animals has positive effects on humans, we use animal avatars in a VR space. To investigate the effect of the animal avatars' appearance on user's self-disclosure and subjective responses, we propose a one-to-one communication system in which the user and interlocutor use animal avatars. The system converts the user's non-verbal information acquired by the sensors mounted on the head-mounted display (HMD) into the movements of the animal avatar and transmits them to the interlocutor. We also describe the design of an experiment using this system.