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The Possibility of Inducing the Proteus Effect for Social VR Users

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HCI International 2022 – Late Breaking Papers: Interacting with eXtended Reality and Artificial Intelligence (HCII 2022)

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Abstract

The Proteus effect in Virtual Reality (VR) happens when the user's behavior or attitude are affected by their avatar's appearance. The virtual body appearance is somehow affecting the emotional, behavioral and psychological state of its user. In recent years, manipulation of an avatar has become a more common situation because of social VR platforms. It is considered that the Proteus effect can be induced even for social VR users. However, there are possibilities to disrupt the Proteus effect by becoming accustomed to embodying an avatar or attachment to their avatar.

In this paper, we investigated whether the Proteus effect can be induced even for social VR users. We experimented on how an artist-like avatar affects the score of creativity on brainstorming in comparison with a common avatar. Fourteen VRChat users participated in our experiment. We evaluate the number of ideas and the quality of ideas during brain-storming. As result, there are no significant differences and interactions between conditions regarding any measures. In addition, there are no equivalencies except the number of selected unique ideas. It implies that an artist-like avatar does not significantly affect the user's creativity in this experiment.. However, six of the fourteen participants reported that the artist-like avatar's appearance affected their thinking during task execution. Our results suggest that further research is needed to fully understand the elicitations, implications and limitations of the Proteus effect in VR.

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Acknowledgment

This work was partially supported by JST Moonshot R&D (Grant Number JPMJMS2013). This work was also supported by the Council for Science, Technology and Innovation, “Cross-ministerial Strategic Innovation Promotion Program (SIP), Big-data and AI- enabled Cyberspace Technologies”. (funding agency: NEDO).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Virtual Reality Educational Research Center, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Akimi Oyanagi, Kazuma Aoyama, Kenichiro Ito & Tomohiro Amemiya

  2. Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Takuji Narumi, Kazuma Aoyama & Tomohiro Amemiya

  3. Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Michitaka Hirose

  4. Würzburg University Human Computer Interaction, Würzburg, Germany

    Jean-Luc Lugrin

Authors
  1. Akimi Oyanagi
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  2. Takuji Narumi
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  3. Jean-Luc Lugrin
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  5. Kenichiro Ito
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  6. Tomohiro Amemiya
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  7. Michitaka Hirose
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Correspondence to Akimi Oyanagi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. U.S. Army Research Laboratory, Adelphi, MD, USA

    Jessie Y. C. Chen

  2. U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Soldier Center, Orlando, FL, USA

    Gino Fragomeni

  3. Siemens (United States), Princeton, NJ, USA

    Helmut Degen

  4. Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH), Heraklion, Crete, Greece

    Stavroula Ntoa

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Oyanagi, A. et al. (2022). The Possibility of Inducing the Proteus Effect for Social VR Users. In: Chen, J.Y.C., Fragomeni, G., Degen, H., Ntoa, S. (eds) HCI International 2022 – Late Breaking Papers: Interacting with eXtended Reality and Artificial Intelligence. HCII 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13518. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21707-4_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21707-4_11

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