Hi, my name is Sueyoon Lee,
and I am a designer and researcher at CWI in Amsterdam.
Today, on behalf of our co-authors, I'm going to present our CHI 2022 work:
“Understanding and designing avatar biosignal visualizations for social virtual reality entertainment”.
This paper was based on my master’s thesis at TU Delft, supported by CWI, in 2021.
Biosignals are all kinds of signals that can be measured and monitored from biological beings,
such as heart rates, breathing rates, muscle contractions.
Recent technologies enabled revealing those previously invisible biosignals,
and researchers have shown that displaying those “expressive” biosignals as a social cue
has the potential to enhance interpersonal communication.
For example, Fannie studied connectedness through visualizing biosignals
with otter animation in a smartwatch, and Javier showed that
skin conductance can help us recognize children’s engagement during social interaction.
Social VR is a type of VR environment, where users can meet and interact with
their virtual representations in a shared immersive environment.
In social VR, avatars can map user’s real movements, and
also sometimes show believable facial expressions.
On top of that, several researchers have explored visualizing biosignals in VR
so that can enhance user’s immersion within the VR spaces.
For example, Ceenu & Mariam investigated different biosignal representations,
such as halo, arrow, for Heart Rate in a social VR game scenario.
Mikko et al. visualized EEG and breathing rate in a VR meditation environment.
However, it remains unclear, what are the user perception on
biosignals and avatar representations in social VR;
how to design interpretable and non-distracting visualizations;
and if we have a set of designs, are they effective in social VR entertainment scenario?
We adopted a user-centric approach to design a set of biosignal visualizations,
and then conducted a controlled study to find the most effective
heart rate and breathing rate visualizations in social VR entertainment setting.
I will guide you through the research process with this diagram on the following slides.
Our work provides two primary contributions: First is
a set of empirically tested social VR biosignal visualizations for HR and BR.
Second, insights and design considerations for visualizing biosignals
in an entertainment-based social VR scenario.
To achieve our first goal, which is to understand
the current users’ perception towards virtual avatar representation,
we conducted a survey and context mapping interviews.
Context mapping is a research method that involves users as ‘experts of their experience’.
We asked users to prefill the workbook
and conducted interviews based on that, so that we can gather deeper insights.
After analysis, we acquired 3 findings, 5 themes on users' attitudes, and
7 aspects to be considered for visualizing biosignals.
Next, based on our understanding of user perception,
we moved on to find the most suitable ways of visualizing users’ biosignals.
Here we narrowed down our focus to social VR entertainment settings,
such as watching movies or attending live music events
because user’s perceptions will be dependent upon the environmental condition, and also
the prior work has shown that those settings have a more open and playful nature
which can lower privacy concerns of revealing biosignals in social VR.
We conducted a co-design session with 6 designers to brainstorm the ways to visualize
heart rate, breathing rate, and EDA, in social VR entertainment settings.
Designers were guided to use the 7 considerations, which were derived from
the previous research when brainstorming their ideas.
During co-design session, we provided designers ideation templates,
which was designed to brainstorm one visualization idea per template.
Co-design session resulted in 6 ways of visualizing biosignals, and
this led to 4 visualization prototypes for the final controlled study.
Based on our set of visualization prototypes, we moved on to find the most effective
HR and BR visualizations in entertainment setting, which is the final goal of our study.
We selected a virtual jazz bar as a use case for the study.
We recruited 32 participants as a pair.
It was a within-subject designed experiment, comparing 4 visualizations:
skeuomorphic, particles, creature, and environment;
2 biosignal types: heart rate and breathing rate;
and 3 biosignal rates: low, rest, and high.
We used artificially generated, simulated biosignals instead of real-time measuring, as
our focus was on comparing the effects of those visualizations.
The first part was a quantitative experiment, where we presented Likert-scale questions
so that people can rate their experience within VR space,
The second part was a qualitative experiment, where we interviewed
participants on their experience within VR space.
Regarding the perceived avatar arousal, we figured that skeuomorphic visualizations
for both heart rate and breathing rate allow differentiable arousal inference.
Regarding the perceived avatar distraction,
Skeuomorphic and Particles were least distracting visualization for heart rate.
However, all the visualizations were similarly distracting for breathing rate.
From the interview, we figured the skeuomorphic design was most intuitive and minimally distracting,
whereas Particles gives an overall atmospheric feeling but some found it as confusing,
The creature was too cute and had distracting nature,
and also regarded as a separate identity instead of being connected to the avatar.
Environment one was suitable for atmospheric mood,
and its peripheral aspect was highlighted by the participants.
I would like to conclude the presentation by sharing some design considerations for future studies.
The more interpretable visualizations are less distracting ones.
The more customized ones are more ambiguous in interpretations.
And users liked to perceive others’ biosignals but were less willing to share their own biosignals.
Please read our paper to find out the detailed user-centric design process
and also deeper insights and statistical analysis.
Thank you for your attention.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.