“Where’s Pinky?”: The Effects of a Reduced Number of Fingers in Virtual Reality

valentin — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 12:25:20 +0000

The hands of one’s avatar are possibly the most visible aspect when interacting in virtual reality (VR). As video games in VR proliferate, it is important to understand how the appearance of avatar hands influence the user experience. Designers of video games often stylize hands and reduce the number of fingers of game characters. Previous work shows that the appearance of avatar hands has significant effects on the user’s presence—the feeling of ‘being’ and ‘acting’ in VR. However, little is known about the effects of missing fingers of an avatar in VR. In this paper, we present a study (N = 24) that investigated the effect of hand representations by parametrically varying the number of fingers of abstract and realistically rendered hands.

We show that decreasing the number of fingers of realistic hands leads to significantly lower levels of presence, which is not the case for abstract hands. Qualitative feedback collected through think-aloud and video revealed potential reasons for the different assessment of realistic and abstract hands with fewer fingers in VR. We contribute design implications and recommend considering the human-likeness when a reduction of the number of fingers of avatar hands is desired.

Read the paper here.

Visit the github repository here.

2017

Schwind, Valentin; Knierim, Pascal; Chuang, Lews; Henze, Niels

“Where's Pinky?”: The Effects of a Reduced Number of Fingers in Virtual Reality Proceedings Article

In: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY), ACM, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2017, ISBN: 978-1-4503-4898-0.

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“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).

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Watch our video here:

Avatars – valentin schwind

“Where’s Pinky?”: The Effects of a Reduced Number of Fingers in Virtual Reality

2017

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

2017