“These are not my hands!”: Effect of Gender on the Perception of Avatar Hands in Virtual Reality

Rendering the user’s body in virtual reality increases immersion and presence – the illusion of ‘being there’. Recent technology enables determining the pose and position of the hands to render them accordingly while interacting within the virtual environment. Virtual reality applications often use realistic male or female hands, mimic robotic hands, or cartoon hands. However, it is unclear how users perceive different hand styles. We conducted a study with 14 male and 14 female participants in virtual reality to investigate the effect of gender on the perception of six different hands.

Science Visualizations for ACM SIGCHI

We (Solveigh Jäger and me) cut, edited and partly recorded* some nice research videos for the CHI2014 in Toronto, Canada. The most important video is the CHI2014 promotional trailer for the human-computer interaction conference itself: