How to communicate better in virtual worlds
October 13, 2011
The experimental setup. Left: The participants wore a total of six tracked objects; right: the corresponding virtual environment, showing the avatars in the self-animated third-person perspective. (Credit: Trevor J. Dodds et al./PLoS One)
Mapping real-world motions to “self-animated” virtual avatars, using body tracking to communicate a wide range of gestures, helps people communicate better in virtual worlds like Second Life, says researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics and Korea University.
They conducted two experiments to investigate whether head-mounted display virtual reality is useful for researching the influence of body gestures in communication; and whether body gestures are used to help in communicating the meaning of a word. Participants worked in pairs and played a communication game, where one person had to describe the meanings of words to the other.
Ref.: Trevor J. Dodds et al., Talk to the Virtual Hands: Self-Animated Avatars Improve Communication in Head-Mounted Display Virtual Environments, PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0025759 (free access)
Comments (2)
by Vstoriguard
I quite agree with LaboriousCretin…who does not seem to live up to his/her name ;-)
And to add my two cents, I’ve played with 2nd Life and a couple of other of the vert worlds and I’ve concluded that they will not live up to their true potential until they have vastly improved their GUIs. When they are at least as convincing as, say, Hanna-Barbera cartoons, they will be far more accessible. Until then, they will remain outside the reach of most users.
victor-storiguard.blogspot.com
by LaboriousCretin
Nice, though looks a little bulky still. and where is the augmented version of this with avatar to human overlay rendering from the skeletal point’s? And they should add tactile feedback or force feedback. Some of those suits are cheap enough to buy or build now.