In this work, we explore how advances in augmented reality technologies are creating a new design space for long-distance telepresence communication through virtual avatars. Studies have shown that the relative size of a speaker has a significant impact on many aspects of human communication including perceived dominance and persuasiveness. Our system synchronizes the body pose of a remote user with a realistic, virtual human avatar visible to a local user wearing an augmented reality head-mounted display. We conducted a two-by-two (relative system size: equivalent vs. small; leader vs.follower), between participants study (N= 40) to investigate the effect of avatar size on the interactions between remote and local user. We found the equal-sized avatars to be significantly more influential than the small-sized avatars and that the small avatars commanded significantly less attention than the equal-sized avatars. Additionally, we found the assigned leadership role to significantly impact participant subjective satisfaction of the task outcome.

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Publications

M. E. Walker, D. Szafir and I. Rae, "The Influence of Size in Augmented Reality Telepresence Avatars,"ج‎2019 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), Osaka, Japan, 2019, pp. 538-546. doi: 10.1109/VR.2019.8798152 (Osaka, Japan – March 23-27, 2019).

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