Abstract Avatar-based virtual reality (VR) is becoming more prevalent in industry and educational settings. There is, however, limited research on the extent to which gender stereotypes are present this environment. The university laboratory study presented paper was conducted a VR environment with participants who were randomly assigned male or female avatars instructed negotiate role of manag...

Previous research has examined the relationship between avatar representation and the sense of presence and co-presence in a shared virtual environment. A positive correlation has been found between the realism of the representation and both categories of presence. However, to our knowledge no research has focused explicitly on the effect of avatar representation in general and connectedness or...

Personality factors such as behavioral inhibition (BI), a temperamental tendency for avoidance in the face of unfamiliar situations, have been identified as risk factors for anxiety disorders. Personality factors are generally identified through self-report inventories. However, this tendency to avoid may affect the accuracy of these self-report inventories. Previously, a computer based task wa...

The article describes the steps and results of a parallel research investigating e-health systems design and implementation for deaf people both in avatar and video technology. The application translates medical knowledge and concepts in deaf sign language for impaired users through an avatar. Two types of avatar technologies are taken into consideration: Video Avatar with recorded humans inter...

We have developed a new prototype of an interactive 3D avatar interface platform on the OpenSim server. It is redesigned and implemented using IronPython programming language. Our previous prototype was written in C# language, and it was modest to update scripts for avatar interaction. IronPython is an opensource implementation of Python language on the Microsoft .Net framework. We can make use...

avatar embodiment within the World Wide Web has gained a lot of popularity in recent years thanks to the introduction of networked virtual environments created for socialization and entertainment purposes. As each of these virtual worlds generates a unique set of user requirements concerning representation preferences based on the environment’s context, it becomes clear that every attempt at cr...

This paper explores avatar roles and design principles in helping to develop motivation in game environments. Different avatar applications could influence the experience of players in at least three ways: as a customisation tool, game strategy, and personal identification. These possible influences could be enhanced by the application of avatar design for motivational purposes, reflected throu...

This study investigates how individuals process an online product review when an avatar is included to represent the peer reviewer. The researchers predicted that both perceived avatar and textual credibility would have a positive influence on perceptions of source trustworthiness and the data supported this prediction. Expectancy violations theory also predicted that discrepancies between the ...

The study investigates how knowledge workers perceive avatar e-mail differently from traditional e-mail, and how they select traditional versus avatar e-mail when different levels of task equivocality and different types of communication direction are present. Three field studies were conducted with knowledge workers who have used avatar and traditional e-mail. This study demonstrates that over...