Collaborative Virtual Environments

Nonverbal behavior, particularly mutual gaze, plays a crucial function in regulating conversations and providing critical social information. In project, we represent participants in a shared immersive virtual environment. Participants sitting in physically remote rooms enter a common virtual room and interact in various ways. The particpants are represented by one of three types of avatars 1) human forms with head movements rendered in real-time, 2) human forms without head movements rendered, or 3) just their voice (i.e., a conference call). Our pilot data demonstrate that participants in the rendered gaze condition rate a higher level of copresence, like each other more, look at each other more, and speak for a lower percentage of time during the game, compared to the other two conditions.