Abstract
In immersive virtual reality (VR) applications, the facial expressions and lip-syncing of an avatar can have a significant impact on a user’s experience. In this paper, we designed a VR “trust game” scene to evaluate the effects of four expression conditions (positive facial expressions, neutral facial expressions, negative facial expressions and no expressions and lip-syncing) on participants in an immersive VR scene. We measured the participants with both objective and subjective measures. The two objective behavioral measures were the level of investment in the “trust game” and the users’ eye-movement data, and the subjective measures included social presence, emotional awareness level, and user preferences. We found that the participants were generally less trusting of the avatars with negative expressions, while the avatars with positive expressions made the participants feel comfortable and thus increased their willingness to cooperate with the avatars. In conclusion, avatars with facial expressions, whether positive or negative, were more effective in influencing the participants’ trust levels and decision-making behaviors than those without facial expressions. These findings provide novel ideas and suggestions for improving the level of human–computer interaction in VR and enhancing user experience in VR scenes.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Fernández-Dols, J.M., Russell, J.A.: The Psychology of Facial Expression. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1997). https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511659911
Izard, C.E.: Emotions as motivations: an evolutionary-developmental perspective. In: Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, vol. 26, pp. 163–200 (1978). https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1982-11912-001
Ekman, P., Oster, H.: Facial expressions of emotion. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 30(1), 527–554 (1979). https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.ps.30.020179.002523
Krach, S., Hegel, F., Wrede, B., Sagerer, G., Binkofski, F., Kircher, T.: Can machines think? Interaction and perspective taking with robots investigated via FMRI. PLoS ONE 3(7), 1–11 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0002597
Berg, J., Dickhaut, J., McCabe, K.: Trust, reciprocity, and social history. Games Econom. Behav. 10(1), 122–142 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1006/game.1995.1027
Scharlemann, J.P., Eckel, C.C., Kacelnik, A., Wilson, R.K.: The value of a smile: game theory with a human face. J. Econ. Psychol. 22(5), 617–640 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-4870(01)00059-9
Krumhuber, E., Manstead, A.S., Cosker, D., Marshall, D., Rosin, P.L., Kappas, A.: Facial dynamics as indicators of trustworthiness and cooperative behavior. Emotion 7(4), 730 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.7.4.730
Agarwal, S., Santra, B., Mukherjee, D.P.: Anubhav: recognizing emotions through facial expression. Vis. Comput. 34(2), 177–191 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-016-1323-z
Smith, H.J., Neff, M.: Communication behavior in embodied virtual reality. In: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1–12 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173863
Pan, Y., Steed, A.: The impact of self-avatars on trust and collaboration in shared virtual environments. PLoS ONE 12(12), 0189078 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0189078
Garau, M., Slater, M., Vinayagamoorthy, V., Brogni, A., Steed, A., Sasse, M.A.: The impact of avatar realism and eye gaze control on perceived quality of communication in a shared immersive virtual environment. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 529–536 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1145/642611.642703
Heidicker, P., Langbehn, E., Steinicke, F.: Influence of avatar appearance on presence in social VR. In: 2017 IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces (3DUI), pp. 233–234 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1109/3DUI.2017.7893357. IEEE
Yoon, B., Kim, H.-I., Lee, G.A., Billinghurst, M., Woo, W.: The effect of avatar appearance on social presence in an augmented reality remote collaboration. In: 2019 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), pp. 547–556. IEEE (2019). https://doi.org/10.1109/VR.2019.8797719
Cho, S., Kim, S.-W., Lee, J., Ahn, J., Han, J.: Effects of volumetric capture avatars on social presence in immersive virtual environments. In: 2020 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), pp. 26–34. IEEE (2020). https://doi.org/10.1109/VR46266.2020.00020
Aseeri, S., Interrante, V.: The influence of avatar representation on interpersonal communication in virtual social environments. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 27(5), 2608–2617 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2021.3067783
Latoschik, M.E., Roth, D., Gall, D., Achenbach, J., Waltemate, T., Botsch, M.: The effect of avatar realism in immersive social virtual realities. In: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology, pp. 1–10 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1145/3139131.3139156
Zibrek, K., Kokkinara, E., McDonnell, R.: The effect of realistic appearance of virtual characters in immersive environments-does the character’s personality play a role? IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 24(4), 1681–1690 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2018.2794638
Gonzalez-Franco, M., Steed, A., Hoogendyk, S., Ofek, E.: Using facial animation to increase the enfacement illusion and avatar self-identification. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 26(5), 2023–2029 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2020.2973075
Hart, J.D., Piumsomboon, T., Lawrence, L., Lee, G.A., Smith, R.T., Billinghurst, M.: Emotion sharing and augmentation in cooperative virtual reality games. In: Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts, pp. 453–460 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1145/3270316.3271543
Ghosh, A., Fyffe, G., Tunwattanapong, B., Busch, J., Yu, X., Debevec, P.: Multiview face capture using polarized spherical gradient illumination. In: Proceedings of the 2011 SIGGRAPH Asia Conference, pp. 1–10 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1145/2024156.2024163
Kampouris, C., Zafeiriou, S., Ghosh, A.: Diffuse-specular separation using binary spherical gradient illumination. In: Proceedings of the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering: Experimental Ideas & Implementations. SR’18, pp. 1–10. Eurographics Association, Goslar, DEU (2018). https://doi.org/10.2312/sre.20181167
Debevec, P., Hawkins, T., Tchou, C., Duiker, H.-P., Sarokin, W., Sagar, M.: Acquiring the reflectance field of a human face. In: Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. SIGGRAPH’00, pp. 145–156. ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., USA (2000). https://doi.org/10.1145/344779.344855
Debevec, P., Wenger, A., Tchou, C., Gardner, A., Waese, J., Hawkins, T.: A lighting reproduction approach to live-action compositing. ACM Trans. Graph. 21(3), 547–556 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1145/566654.566614
Wenger, A., Gardner, A., Tchou, C., Unger, J., Hawkins, T., Debevec, P.: Performance relighting and reflectance transformation with time-multiplexed illumination. ACM Trans. Graph. 24(3), 756–764 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1145/1073204.1073258
Alexander, O., Rogers, M., Lambeth, W., Chiang, J.-Y., Ma, W.-C., Wang, C.-C., Debevec, P.: The digital Emily project: achieving a photorealistic digital actor. IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl. 30(4), 20–31 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1109/MCG.2010.65
Metahuman Creator. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/metahuman-creator/ (2021)
Taylor, S., Kim, T., Yue, Y., Mahler, M., Krahe, J., Rodriguez, A.G., Hodgins, J., Matthews, I.: A deep learning approach for generalized speech animation. ACM Trans. Graph. (TOG) 36(4), 1–11 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1145/3072959.3073699
Karras, T., Aila, T., Laine, S., Herva, A., Lehtinen, J.: Audio-driven facial animation by joint end-to-end learning of pose and emotion. ACM Trans. Graph. (TOG) 36(4), 1–12 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1145/3072959.3073658
Olszewski, K., Lim, J.J., Saito, S., Li, H.: High-fidelity facial and speech animation for VR HMDS. ACM Trans. Graph. (TOG) 35(6), 1–14 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1145/2980179.2980252
Burgos-Artizzu, X.P., Fleureau, J., Dumas, O., Tapie, T., LeClerc, F., Mollet, N.: Real-time expression-sensitive HMD face reconstruction. In: SIGGRAPH Asia 2015 Technical Briefs, pp. 1–4 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1145/2820903.2820910
Guo, K., Xu, F., Yu, T., Liu, X., Dai, Q., Liu, Y.: Real-time geometry, albedo, and motion reconstruction using a single RGB-D camera. ACM Trans. Graph. (ToG) 36(4), 1 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1145/3072959.3083722
Wei, S.-E., Saragih, J., Simon, T., Harley, A.W., Lombardi, S., Perdoch, M., Hypes, A., Wang, D., Badino, H., Sheikh, Y.: VR facial animation via multiview image translation. ACM Trans. Graph. (TOG) 38(4), 1–16 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3306346.3323030
Suzuki, K., Nakamura, F., Otsuka, J., Masai, K., Itoh, Y., Sugiura, Y., Sugimoto, M.: Recognition and mapping of facial expressions to avatar by embedded photo reflective sensors in head mounted display. In: 2017 IEEE Virtual Reality (VR), pp. 177–185. IEEE (2017). https://doi.org/10.1109/VR.2017.7892245
Tortosa, M.I., Strizhko, T., Capizzi, M., Ruz, M.: Interpersonal effects of emotion in a multi-round trust game. Psicologica Int. J. Methodol. Exp. Psychol. 34(2), 179–198 (2013). https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1018812
Stouten, J., De Cremer, D.: Seeing is believing: the effects of facial expressions of emotion and verbal communication in social dilemmas. J. Behav. Decis. Mak. 23(3), 271–287 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.659
Jaeger, B., Evans, A.M., Stel, M., van Beest, I.: Explaining the persistent influence of facial cues in social decision-making. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 148(6), 1008 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000591
Mussel, P., Göritz, A.S., Hewig, J.: The value of a smile: facial expression affects ultimatum-game responses. Judgm. Decis. Mak. 8(3) (2013). https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-129639
Mathur, M.B., Reichling, D.B.: An uncanny game of trust: social trustworthiness of robots inferred from subtle anthropomorphic facial cues. In: 2009 4th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human–Robot Interaction (HRI), pp. 313–314 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1145/1514095.1514192
Wu, J., Paeng, E., Linder, K., Valdesolo, P., Boerkoel, J.: Trust and cooperation in human–robot decision making. https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/FSS/FSS16/paper/view/14118/13675 (2016)
Paradeda, R.B., Hashemian, M., Rodrigues, R.A., Paiva, A.: How facial expressions and small talk may influence trust in a robot. In: Agah, A., Cabibihan, J.-J., Howard, A.M., Salichs, M.A., He, H. (eds.) Social Robotics, pp. 169–178. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47437-3_17
George, C., Eiband, M., Hufnagel, M., Hussmann, H.: Trusting strangers in immersive virtual reality. In: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces Companion. IUI’18 Companion. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA (2018). https://doi.org/10.1145/3180308.3180355
Kugler, T., Ye, B., Motro, D., Noussair, C.N.: On trust and disgust: evidence from face reading and virtual reality. Soc. Psychol. Pers. Sci. 11(3), 317–325 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550619856302
Harjunen, V., Spape, M., Ahmed, I., Jacucci, G., Ravaja, N.: Persuaded by the machine: the effect of virtual nonverbal cues and individual differences on compliance in economic bargaining. Comput. Hum. Behav. 87, 11 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.06.012
Mori, M., MacDorman, K.F., Kageki, N.: The uncanny valley [from the field]. IEEE Robotics Autom. Mag. 19(2), 98–100 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1109/MRA.2012.2192811
Ekman, P., Friesen, W.V.: Facial Action Coding System. American Psychological Association (APA) (1978). https://doi.org/10.1037/t27734-000
Meneses, J.A.C., Díaz, J.M.M.: Vocal emotion expressions effects on cooperation behavior. Psicológica 38(1), 1–24 (2017). https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/169/16949050001.pdf
Games, E.: Recording Facial Animation from an iOS Device. https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/AnimatingObjects/SkeletalMeshAnimation/FacialRecordingiPhone/ (2021)
Harms, P.C., Biocca, P.F.: Internal Consistency and Reliability of the Networked Minds Measure of Social Presence. http://cogprints.org/7026/ (2004)
Biocca, P.F., Harms, P.C.: Guide to the Networked Minds Social Presence Inventory v. 1.2. http://cogprints.org/6743/ (2003)
Boyle, G.J.: Reliability and validity of Izard’s differential emotions scale. Pers. Individ. Differ. 7, 747–750 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(84)90124-7
Tu, Z., Weng, D., Cheng, D., Shen, R., Fang, H., Bao, Y.: The effect of two different types of human–computer interactions on user’s emotion in virtual counseling environment. In: 2019 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct), pp. 217–221 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1109/ISMAR-Adjunct.2019.00-43
Pauw, L.S., Sauter, D.A., van Kleef, G.A., Lucas, G.M., Gratch, J., Fischer, A.H.: The avatar will see you now: support from a virtual human provides socio-emotional benefits. Comput. Hum. Behav. 136, 107368 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2022.107368
Shao, D., Lee, I.-J.: Acceptance and influencing factors of social virtual reality in the urban elderly. Sustainability 12(22) (2020). https://doi.org/10.3390/su12229345
Baker, S., Kelly, R.M., Waycott, J., Carrasco, R., Hoang, T., Batchelor, F., Ozanne, E., Dow, B., Warburton, J., Vetere, F.: Interrogating social virtual reality as a communication medium for older adults. Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact. 3(CSCW) (2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3359251
Funding
This work was supported by the Key-Area Research and Development Program of Guangdong Province (No. 2019B010149001) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 62072036) and the 111 Project (B18005).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary Information
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Supplementary file 1 (mp4 2414 KB)
Supplementary file 2 (mp4 5434 KB)
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Luo, L., Weng, D., Ding, N. et al. The effect of avatar facial expressions on trust building in social virtual reality. Vis Comput 39, 5869–5882 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-022-02700-1
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-022-02700-1