The Influence of Face and Gaze Tracking in HMDs on the Social Perception of Avatars
Matthias Wölfel, Daniel Hepperle, Jonas Deuchler, Michael Florath · 2025
The advent of head-mounted displays and sensors that track various bodily characteristics, including gaze and facial expression, has made it possible to create highly realistic virtual representations and movements of people’s faces and bodies, resulting in lifelike avatars. While some users within the same social virtual reality application may utilize advanced devices to track and replicate a multitude of subtle bodily movements and expressions, other users may lack access to sophisticated tracking technology for various reasons. In the context of avatar-mediated communication, this technological disparity has the potential to influence how avatars are perceived by others. To investigate whether notable discrepancies exist in the social perception of avatars among interlocutors, a crossover design was employed with 32 participants exposed to one identical representation of an avatar with the following two variations: one shows gaze and facial expressions according to the tracked features in the headset, the other exhibiting pseudo-random gaze and facial movements. The findings indicate that tracking significantly enhanced the avatar’s perceived social characteristics humanlikeness and likability while expertise is not influenced.