Manipulating Avatars for Enhanced Communication in Extended Reality

Avatars are common virtual representations used in Extended Reality (XR) to support interaction and communication between remote collaborators. Recent advancements in wearable displays provide features such as eye and face-tracking, to enable avatars to express non-verbal cues in XR. The research in this paper investigates the impact of avatar visualization on Social Presence and user's preference by simulating face tracking in an asymmetric XR remote collaboration between a desktop user and a Virtual Reality (VR) user. Our study was conducted between pairs of participants, one on a laptop computer supporting face tracking and the other being immersed in VR, experiencing different visualization conditions. They worked together to complete an island survival task. We found that the users preferred 3D avatars with facial expressions placed in the scene, compared to 2D screen attached avatars without facial expressions. Participants felt that the presence of the collaborator's avatar improved overall communication, yet Social Presence was not significantly different between conditions as they mainly relied on audio for communication.