Effects of Avatar Visibility and Perspective on Social Presence and Performance in Dynamic VR Collaboration Tasks

Dynamic collaboration is a common form of human interaction in everyday life. With the increasing support of virtual reality (VR) applications for such collaborative joint actions, understanding how visualization design choices affect collaboration becomes crucial. However, the impact of two key elements — avatar visibility and perspective — remains underexplored in dynamic collaborative tasks. To address this, we conducted two user studies representing distinct collaborative contexts: a proximal task and a spatially distributed task. Within these contexts, we investigated how varying levels of avatar visibility (full-body, upper-body, and head-and-hands) and perspectives (first-person perspective, 1PP, and third-person perspective, 3PP) influenced social presence and collaborative performance, including both task completion and team coordination aspects. Our findings revealed that 3PP significantly enhanced both social presence and team coordination compared to 1PP. The impact of avatar visibility was context-dependent: in environments with low dynamic complexity, even low-visibility avatars maintained effective collaboration, while complex spatial tasks benefited from increased avatar visibility. Furthermore, our research demonstrated that 3PP mitigated the negative effects of low-visibility avatars in 1PP, lessening coordination conflicts in spatially complex scenarios. Based on these findings, we propose design recommendations for avatar visibility and perspective choices in dynamic collaborative environments. Our research advances the understanding of how these fundamental visual design elements shape VR collaboration, informing the design of future interactive environments.