“It will always be true, however, that many people couldn’t care less how their avatars are perceived by others as they have absolutely no mental or emotional investment in them.”

I agree, especially if the use of the avatar is recreational and/or infrequent. The assumption I’m making in this article is that the reader is interested in using an avatar for business. If that’s the case, then they should have at least some mental investment, since it’s a requirement for the work that they do.

“They imply that somehow the user is not “letting” the avatar be animated to respond to a speaker, make eye contact, stand a certain distance away, or otherwise show human body language to enrich the interaction.”

Not really, since in most of the studies there is no human controller and the avatar’s liveliness is preprogrammed (of course this isn’t true of the studies based in existing virtual world activities rather than a limited study in the lab). This has led to some interesting results, such as the inferred eye-gaze avatars being seen as more “real” even if no one was controlling them. (Here’s another one in a similar vein, but it’s kind of old: http://www.justinecassell.com/publications/agents_journal99.pdf)

“What these types of studies never seem to delve into is the WORK that must go into the appearance of body language and to me therein lies the rub, validity-wise. Also, I have no doubt that this is why many find virtual worlds unappealing; they simply don’t want to take the time or make the effort to become master puppeteers (and that’s a totally valid concern — time is precious).”

This is true, and it’s not just time that is precious – so is attention. It’s hard to focus on the “realism” of your avatar if you’re in the middle of a meeting or collaboration study. Also, to address your point about how much work it takes to implement this “realism” in one’s avatar, there is this other study that I failed to include because of length constraints, but you might be interested in it: http://www.civil.columbia.edu/gpndl/publications/documents/WP1105_final.pdf

Basically, it shows how the addition of text-based chat, accessories or other visual cues in place of things like raising one’s hand, voting, etc. There’s a lengthy part about seating confusion, when the users were still figuring out how to get their avatars seated correctly.

Like you, I do want to see more reliable studies on avatar use, since I couldn’t find many that explored the learning curve or the “breaking in” it takes to get used to handling an avatar.

“Web Collaboration allows people to work the way their avatar would if they could get a job on Second Life. If we weren’t afraid of lawsuits, we might have called it “Second Job”. Also, that wouldn’t have made any sense to a lot of people.” – Scott Annan, CEO of Mercury Grove

We are thinking along the same lines, Glad to see the point of view is valid in many spaces.

The bottom line, of course, is that looks always matter, both physically and digitally. And this is even more so in a virtual environment because it is almost entirely a visual experience (with some sound thrown in for texture).

The situation regarding eye gaze and proximity, however, is an entirely separate matter. I have read such studies in the past and some of the earlier ones had an initially interesting idea from which they then made laughable conclusions, purely because they were imbuing more personality and function into the digital character than actually existed. Or, they were drawing conclusions from snapshot evidence that was totally misinterpreted. What comes to mind as an example is this now (infamous, and totally misrepresented) snap from 2006 [http://www.flickr.com/photos/therefore/86267355/] (Note: Just in case the picture is removed by the owner, it depicts two newbie male avatars. One is editing his appearance and the other is standing nearby (on a steep slope, by the way) typing a message. Because of their proximity the hands of the typing avatar are intersecting the other at the waist level. This is a totally innocent and common occurrence even now by people who are not yet used to controlling their avatars and are not familiar with their functions. However, the asinine (and obviously anti-SL®) implication from the poster is evident in the caption which reads, “Welcome to Second Life, Now Let’s Grope….”).

Later studies (as in ones you have mentioned in your post) have taken a more scientific approach and have shown what is already intuitively obvious to regular avatar users; eye contact and proximity can indeed affect the validity of the in-world experience for many, as well as how seriously one person perceives the other via digital persona. It will always be true, however, that many people couldn’t care less how their avatars are perceived by others as they have absolutely no mental or emotional investment in them. To those people the avatar is nothing more than a computer cursor with arms and legs and not good for anything other than as a tool for navigation. Nevertheless, there are still a lot of reasons to be dubious about some aspects of these studies because it’s obvious they are still imbuing the avatar with some kind of magical connection with the human “pilot” if you will. They imply that somehow the user is not “letting” the avatar be animated to respond to a speaker, make eye contact, stand a certain distance away, or otherwise show human body language to enrich the interaction. Nothing could be more wrong.

Someday we will have holographic avatars that respond to our physical-world movements and expressions, but currently we have a rather crude facsimile to work with. Regardless of how we (including myself) become emotionally and intellectually attached to our digital selves, the fact remains that avatars are merely puppets, and totally dependent on constant attention and manipulation to appear “alive.” Just as when a marionette’s strings are cut and the puppet falls to the ground inert, so the avatar ceases to be a persona when the pilot fails to give it constant attention. What these types of studies never seem to delve into is the WORK that must go into the appearance of body language and to me therein lies the rub, validity-wise. Also, I have no doubt that this is why many find virtual worlds unappealing; they simply don’t want to take the time or make the effort to become master puppeteers (and that’s a totally valid concern — time is precious).

However, for those readers who ARE interested I have a few comments:

1) In the default state, without any type of animation overrider or active manipulation, an avatar in Second Life or similar virtual world stands and cycles through a series of minor (rather boring) fidget animations and stares vacantly off into space with a deadpan expression. Not very enthralling. It’s important to know that in Second Life and OpenSim (which is based on SL) the avatar skeleton and facial morph points have been severely reduced, presumably to lighten the resources an avatar needs (which are already considerable anyway), therefore facial expression is yet another entire issue of contention, since one has to “make do” with the limited possibilities.

2) By adding animations via an overrider that provides more interesting and even entertaining body movements one can personalize the avatar’s presence, but it’s still just hands-off fidgeting, and the eyes are still just vacantly staring in the direction the head is turned with no facial expression.

3) If one wants to show active interest in anything the avatar must be moved toward that person or thing, the head must be turned in that direction, and the eyes must appear to be focused on the subject. All of this requires practice and in many cases finesse, without which everything from lack of interest to misconstrued actions (as mentioned above) can be perceived.

4) In the default state the avatar’s head (direction of looking) will follow the mouse cursor on the screen, so in the simplest sense all one has to do to appear interested in someone who is nearby is to turn in that person’s direction and then rest the mouse cursor on their head. Your avatar will then appear to be looking directly at the other avatar’s face. Of course, this effect is easily (and often) thwarted when you move your mouse cursor around on the screen to find things, click on them, or use the interface. Your avatar’s head then swivels all around following the cursor and you appear distracted and not focused (quite the contrary!). By the way, once you are acclimated to it, you can often tell what another person is doing on their screen by watching their avatar’s head movements. :-) A very common result of this lack of practice or concern can be seen when someone’s avatar appears to be constantly looking down at the ground near their own feet, a sure sign that puppeteering is for the moment neglected. The most blatant result of neglect is that the avatar “goes AFK” and appears to fall asleep in-world. Always a big no-no, but a frequent occurence.

5) To take control over this head/eye movement indicating attention is simple, but requires vigilance and frequent updating (its primary weakness and the cause for much of the misconception in studies). You merely hold down the ALT key on the keyboard then mouse-click on the person’s face (or other object) to focus your avatar’s gaze there. Even if the object/person of attention moves your avatar will follow the focused point until the action is broken by your movement, or by an animation that overrides your intent.

6) In the case of animations, particularly those placed into an animation overrider that replaces the defaults, the avatar’s head and eyes are taken over by the animations IF the animation creator gives those movements priority. If the animator relinquishes control in his/her animation to the default setting then the mouse-cursor rules above still apply. If not, then your avatar becomes a temporary slave to the current animation and looks away.

7) And finally (yay, right?) the best way to ensure an appearance of focused attention is to buy or create (and this is much easier than most people think) poses and animations that control one or more avatars so that they are made to look and behave as if they are paying attention (even though the puppeteer may be off looking at Twitter and only listening to the discussion). An example would be a dual pose on which each avatar sits which gives the illusion of them both standing in front of each other gesticulating and looking each other in the eye, or a set of classroom animations where all the attendees are apparently paying rapt attention to the speaker in the front of the room.

As you conclude in your post, to make communication and collaboration in-world more effective and comfortable spontaneous activity and personal space issues would need to be automatic. However, that is far from the case presently, and I think will be so for quite some time. The more important question, it seems to me, is how important is this interactivity to each person and HOW MUCH WORK are they willing to put into the implementation of same?

By the way, if we ever meet in Second Life, I’ll expect you to look at me when I’m talking to you. ;-)