Virtual Reality, Avatars and the Chameleon Effect

Virtual Reality and Social Networks Will Be a Powerful Combination

Avatars will make social networks seductive.

By Jeremy N. Bailenson, Jim Blascovich

Half a billion people spend more than 20 hours a week ‘wearing’ avatars. A virtual representation of a politician could be more convincing than the person it represents, and your heart beats just as fast when your girlfriend winks at you from your computer screen as it does in person.

The Vice President of IBM predicts that by 2015 avatars will be used in meetings and eventually will play a larger role in communication.

The advantage of avatars is that technology can be used to detect only specific motions, translating them to the avatar and saving on bandwidth that HD pixels would use otherwise and avoiding lag.

These avatars can be filtered and set up to do things that no normal person can do which research has shown can be very influential. The brain has trouble telling the difference between real and virtual experiences. A study at Stanford University by Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves in the 1990’s showed that users who were on a slow computer were later asked to survey that machine’s performance, on that same machine and rated it more positively than when they were asked to survey on a different station. Perhaps they didn't want to hurt the computer’s feelings? So how will we treat a virtual avatar of our friends, heroes or business meetings?

People want to be more likable, hence why this virtual world is often preferred. Weight loss is instant and a bad hair day never happens. Tanya Chartrand, a social psychologist did a study at Duke where interviewers gestures were mimicked by the ones they interviewed without them knowing. They often preferred those who mimicked them, labeled “the chameleon effect.” This was later tried with avatars reciting policies at a university that mimicked the head movements of the listener with a four second delay. The Avatars that did this mimicry were rated higher by participants than those who did not.

In a different study participants were very open to liking avatars that detected the user’s looks and would produce avatars with 20% similar facial characteristics. These were subtle, but enough to show how this could be used in the future to persuade users into various situations.

These examples suggest a synergy between the mind and immersive virtual technology. On the one hand, the brain treats real and virtual experiences as the same. On the other hand, in virtual reality, the rules of grounded reality are suspended.

In virtual reality, avatars can age, grow, or become supermodels at the touch of a button. They can use conversational superpowers, including large-scale mimicry and gaze, or wear other people's faces and bodies. Rationally, people bring specific expectations, perhaps guarded ones, when interacting with virtual others. However, the brain cannot consistently keep this guard up for long stretches of social interaction, and these super avatars tend to elicit very human responses.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/virtual-reality-and-social-networks-will-be-a-powerful-combination/0