RESUMO
Photorealistic avatars show great potential in social VR and VR collaboration. However, identity and privacy issues are threatening avatars' authenticity in social VR. In addition to the necessary authentication and protection, effective solutions are needed to convey avatars' authenticity status to users and thereby enhance the overall trustworthiness. We designed several visual indicators (VIs) using static or dynamic visual effects on photorealistic avatars and evaluated their effectiveness in visualizing avatars' authenticity status. In this study we explored suitable attributes and designs for conveying the authenticity of photorealistic avatars and influencing their perceived trustworthiness. Furthermore, we investigated how different interactivity levels influence their effectiveness (the avatar was either presented in a static image, an animated video clip, or an immersive virtual environment). Our findings showed that using a full name can increase trust, while most other VIs could decrease users' trust. We also found that interactivity levels significantly impacted users' trust and the effectiveness of VIs. Based on our results, we developed design guidelines for visual indicators as effective tools to convey authenticity, as a first step towards the improvement of trustworthiness in social VR with identity management.
RESUMO
Virtual humans, including virtual agents and avatars, play an increasingly important role as VR technology advances. For example, virtual humans are used as digital bodies of users in social VR or as interfaces for AI assistants in online financing. Interpersonal trust is an essential prerequisite in real-life interactions, as well as in the virtual world. However, to date, there are no established interpersonal trust measurement tools specifically for virtual humans in virtual reality. This study fills the gap, by contributing a novel validated behavioural tool to measure interpersonal trust towards a specific virtual social interaction partner in social VR. This validated paradigm is inspired by a previously proposed virtual maze task that measures trust towards virtual characters. In the current study, a variant of this paradigm was implemented. The task of the users (the trustors) is to navigate through a maze in virtual reality, where they can interact with a virtual human (the trustee). They can choose to 1) ask for advice and 2) follow the advice from the virtual human if they want to. These measures served as behavioural measures of trust. We conducted a validation study with 70 participants in a between-subject design. The two conditions did not differ in the content of the advice but in the appearance, tone of voice and engagement of the trustees (alleged as avatars controlled by other participants). Results indicate that the experimental manipulation was successful, as participants rated the virtual human as more trustworthy in the trustworthy condition than in the untrustworthy condition. Importantly, this manipulation affected the trust behaviour of our participants, who, in the trustworthy condition, asked for advice more often and followed advice more often, indicating that the paradigm is sensitive to assessing interpersonal trust towards virtual humans. Thus, our paradigm can be used to measure differences in interpersonal trust towards virtual humans and may serve as a valuable research tool to study trust in virtual reality.