In this article, we investigate the effects of avatars’ appearance on user sociability in virtual worlds. In particular, we study gender and appearance differences in social communication preferences and behavior in virtual worlds. For this purpose, we have employed the virtual ethnographic method, which is an adaptation of traditional ethnography for the study of cyberspace. Although we only e...

Responsive motion generation of avatars who have physical interactions with their environment is a key issue in VR and video games. We present a performance-driven avatar control interface with physicallybased motion retrieval. When the interaction between the user-controlled avatar and its environment is going to happen, the avatar has to select the motion clip that satisfies both kinematic an...

Avatar-equipped e-commerce is an information technology-driven business model in cyberspace. It is one of the most successful online venues developed in Korea. This research explores the process of developing customer loyalty regarding the use of Avatar in online communities and the possibility of the effective use of Avatar in electronic business development. In particular, five different soci...

There are many attempts to use the gestures for the natural human computer interface. Most of systems use the tracking devices to capture the human motion and display. In this paper, we propose a gesture recognition system for natural interface between the participant and his own avatar in virtual environment only using two polhemus sensors attached on the arm. Our system has two modes for the ...

Video games are becoming more popular; there has been a particular rise in interest and use of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). These games utilize avatar creation; avatars can be seen as the technological instantiation of the real person in the virtual world. Little research has been conducted on avatar creation. Although it is has been anecdotally postulated that you...

This study attempts to understand how people can promote cognition-based trust in virtual worlds such as Second Life. The effects of the two presentation formats on avatars’ appearance as well as the moderating role of the disclosure of offline identity were examined in a laboratory experiment. The experimental results show that (1) a more sophisticated avatar leads to higher cognition-based tr...

The paper discusses the experience of "social presence" as a relevant effect dimension of avatarmediated net-communication. Special attention is paid to measurement issues combining subjective verbal reports of social presence with objective behavioral data relating nonverbal activity, visual attention and person perception. Data will be reported from a study comparing the effects of different ...

This paper investigates whether the nature of an online environment can prime users to create avatars that emphasize particular characteristics. Participants created an avatar for one of three contrasting settings: blogging, dating or gaming. For the most part, avatars in blogging were created to accurately reflect their owners’ physical appearance, lifestyle and preferences. By contrast, parti...