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

valentin — Wed, 22 Feb 2017 16:15:16 +0000

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. Quantitative and qualitative results show that women perceive lower levels of presence while using male avatar hands and male perceive lower levels of presence using non-human avatar hands. While women dislike male hands, men accept and feel presence with avatar hands of both genders. Our results highlight the importance of considering the users’ diversity when designing virtual reality experiences.

Our paper received an Honorable Mention Award and will be presented at CHI’2017 in Denver, CO

Read the paper here.

2017

Schwind, Valentin; Knierim, Pascal; Tasci, Cagri; Franczak, Patrick; Haas, Nico; Henze, Niels

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

In: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2017, (Honorable Mention Award).

Links | BibTeX

Watch our video here:

Science Visualizations for ACM SIGCHI

valentin — Fri, 14 Mar 2014 16:00:47 +0000

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:

CHI2014 Promo Video

[embedyt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN1wLizrsKY&width=880&height=500[/embedyt]

CHI2014 “I can wait a minute” *

[embedyt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65kS84PpPJg&width=880&height=500[/embedyt]

CHI2014 “FrameBox and MirrorBox”

[embedyt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRZXoKcacsM&width=880&height=500[/embedyt]

CHI2014 “Large-Scale Assessment of Mobile Notifications” *

[embedyt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETqMeIQXz4s&width=880&height=500[/embedyt]

Science Vis – valentin schwind