Avatars and Agents in Virtual Systems

Avatars in Virtual Reality

Michael Gerhard, David Moore, and Dave Hobbs defined an avatar as the 3D graphic representation of a user’s identity in the virtual worlds. An avatar is the user’s embodiment in a collaborative virtual world—the representation of a user’s identity within a multiuser computer environment. Providing a tangible representative form of the user is a crucial feature that distinguishes a virtual reality from other communication systems (e.g., discussion forums or voice chat systems) that involve only disembodied actions and speech. The use of anthropomorphic avatars provides virtual users or learners the opportunity and freedom to manipulate their identity. For example, a study by Holtjona Galanxhi and Fiona Nah found that the use of avatars in a computer-mediated chat environment does not have an impact on one’s perceived trustworthiness but will reduce anxiety by making people less anxious about the fact that they are deceiving others.

Scholars such as Gerhard and others have argued that the use of avatars enables direct visual interaction of users with the 3D virtual space and multimodal interaction or conversation with other avatars (users) in the virtual world. Jim Blascovich emphasized that in face-to-face communication, humans use their bodies to provide a focus for social interaction with immediate, continuous information about their status, mood, activity, and many other identity or presence factors. Human bodily presence, with its postural and gestural nonverbal language, also provides an important complement to verbal forms of communication. Considering the role of human bodies in face-to-face communication, it is important to embody users or learners when designing a virtual reality as a collaborative virtual learning system. Avatars in a virtual world (e.g., Second Life and OpenSimulator) can typically interact with each other with both verbal chats (voice or text based) and nonverbal body gestures or facial expressions, providing the similarity (if not equivalence) of face-to-face social interactions.

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