Reconsidering the avatar : From user mirror to interaction locus

This thesis is concerned with shared virtual environments for collaborative work. An important aspect of shared virtual environments is the avatar, the representation of the user in the virtual world. The proper design of the avatar has been the subject of considerable research, aimed at allowing the avatars to express as much as possible of human non-verbal communication and, as it were, tie the user closer to the virtual world. I will go through the historical development of shared virtual environments and how the design principles for avatars have followed the available technology over time. I describe earlier research on extending avatars and environments in order to better support collaboration in virtual spaces. I will then describe a user study where pairs of subjects cooperated on a construction task, and the implications for design of collaborative applications in VEs that can be drawn from this study. In particular I show how the subjects used the available resources in the environment to negotiate a shared understanding of the environment and the task. Some of the subjects had no visible avatars, but still solved the task by using the environment itself to orient themselves and draw attention to important features of the environment. Following this, I and co-workers have designed virtual environments which have had no explicit avatars, nor have used traditional methods for navigation in 3D space, but rather relied on task-oriented features of the space, such as agglomerations of other users or interesting objects in order to present a relevant view of the environment. A view position may be shared by several users, or be “unoccupied”, merely representing a potential site for interaction. Based on these experiences, I make the claim that a traditional anthropomorphic avatar is neither necessary nor sufficient for successful collaboration in virtual spaces, but the design of navigation and user representation is contingent on the specific application, some reasonable applications not utilising a user representation at all.