Thank you for watching.
I'm Guo Freeman, presenting on behalf
of my student, Divine Maloney.
The title of our paper is Body, Avatar,
and Me, the Presentation and Perception of Self
in Social Virtual Reality.
Self-presentation in online digital social spaces
has been a long-standing research
interest in HCI and CSCW.
As online social spaces evolve towards more embodied
digital representations, it is important to understand
how users construct and experience their self
and interact with others' self in new and more complicated
ways.
One such example is social virtual reality.
Social VR refers to 3D virtual spaces
where multiple users can interact with one another
through VR head-mounted displays.
Especially, social VR introduces an entirely new form
of self-presentation by offering full-body tracked avatars,
where the avatar's movements will
correspond to the real-time movements
of one's physical body.
Therefore, to further explore the nuance
of self-presentation dynamics in social VR, in this paper,
we focus on three research questions.
What criteria do people use to construct their self
presentation in social VR?
How do people perceive and approach
others' self-presentation in social VR, and how, if at all,
does self-presentation in social VR
affect people's understanding of their self?
To collect data, we conducted 30 interviews with social VR users
with diverse gender, race, and experiences
of social VR platforms.
We then used an in-depth qualitative analysis
to analyze the data.
To answer RQ1, our findings show that social VR users construct
their self-presentation based on two main criteria--
creating consistent self-presentation that
is similar to one's physical self,
or building a platform-specific self-presentation
based on the social atmosphere afforded by the platform.
To answer RQ2, we found that aesthetics, gender, race,
and maturity are four important aspects that social VR
users often emphasize when perceiving and approaching
others' self-presentation.
To answer RQ3, we found that self-presentation in social VR
affects people's understanding of their self in three ways--
as an adventurous means to experience one's everyday self,
as an engaging approach to discover one's unknown self,
and as an embodied way to explore gender identity.
By way of a conclusion, we want to highlight
several implications of our work.
First, we highlight a self-presentation mechanism
that emphasizes consistency in social VR.
This interplay of body, avatar, audience,
and a consumer's personal choices
makes the self-presentation in social VR quite unique.
Second, we call for more research as the essential role
of voice in perceiving others' self-presentation
and the intertwining relationships
among different dimensions of identity presentation,
such as appearance, gender, race, and age.
We also pointed to several new perspectives of the Proteus
Effect in social VR, which refers to the phenomena
where people conform to their avatar and the mental makeup
of their avatar.
On the one hand, Proteus Effect can
be experienced in a more powerful and embodied manner
in social VR due to the direct connection between one's body
and his or her avatar.
On the other hand, many participants
also clearly stated their preference
to distinguish the VR self from the physical self.
Lastly, we also highlight a few implications for social VR
design that can better support nuanced self presentation,
including avatar designed for presenting cultural identity
and gender identity, platform embedded voice
modulators, and alternatives to full-body tracked avatars.
Therefore, our study contributes to the growing body
of CSCW literature on social VR by offering
empirical evidence of how social VR platforms afford
new phenomena and approaches of novel identity practices,
and by providing potential design implications to further
support such practices.
We also expand the existing research agenda
in CSCW on the increasing complexity
of people's self-presentation in emerging novel sociotechnical
systems.
Thank you.
I'm happy to answer any questions.