C&I: virtual identity
Virtual Self & Virtual Other
Meeting another person is one of the most amazing experiences you can have in Virtual Reality. It is quite unlike communicating through any other medium except a real life face-to-face conversation. Because the other person is life size and shares a virtual space with you, body language works in a way that cannot be done on a flat screen. In order to create social connectedness between players you can design bodily and facial expressions. Facial expressions are very powerful, even when randomly generated.
The Avatar
The first avatar face in VR was designed by Ann Lasko at the end of the 80s, and she made it out of twenty polygons; an origami face. Waldo was one of the first CG-characters, created in 1989.
Designing character via movement
"Your most important canvas is not the virtual world, but the user's sensorimotor loop (cognitive-haptic-motion-sound-sense)." - Jaron Lanier (see chapter Advice for Designers VR)
Designing Movement for Avatars Laban Movement Analysis is a method and a language invented by Hungarian dancer, teacher and author Rudolf Laban (1879-1958). It is used for designing VR-characters. Below in the video you can see how a character is created out of Laban Movement Analysis viewpoint.
Practical motion capture options How To Make 3 Point Tracked Full-Body Avatars in VR Motion Capture mit HTC Vive und IKinema Orion Adobe Fuse & Mixamo
Facial Expressions: micro
Facial expressions are very powerful, even when randomly generated. Eyebrow-movements and movement of the mouth can be impactful and can be a great solution when bodily representation is not an option for the VR-avatar. They can even provide better immersion than full-representation of the face.
Facial Expressions introduction Relating Muscle Movement to Emotion Facial Action Coding System (FACS) - a visual guidebook Subtle Expressions Training Tool by Paul Ekman Micro Expressions and Gestural Slips, Paul Ekman Group
Additional information
General information about virtual identity
Reimagining the Avatar Dream What your avatar says about you Digital freedom: Virtual reality, avatars, and multiple identities More information at virtual identity summit: https://www.virtualidentitysummit.com/
Virtual Representation
Visual Representation
Placement on the realism continuum or abstraction triangle (ideas, nature, form),
Depth cues, interface, color, size, placement, abstract concepts representation, motion
Aural Representation
Time based, realism and immersion, force attention, sensory substitution, sonification, spatialisation
Communicate new information or reinforce, sounds can be ambient, markers (occurrence of event), localized, speech
Uncanny Valley
The uncanny valley is a psychological theory about the effect involving art and robots and human emotions. As something starts to look more human-like, there is a point at which people start to feel it looks wrong. At this point, they have negative feelings toward the object. These feelings keep getting worse as the object is made to look more human-like. At a certain point, as the object starts to get very close to looking human-like, how people feel towards it tend to reverse and they have more positive emotional feelings towards it. The theory was created by the robotics professor Masahiro Mori in 1970.
In Search of the Uncanny Valley
Laban Movement Analysis
article 3: Laban Movement Analysis made simple
Other papers
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