Effects of volumetric capture avatars on social presence in immersive virtual environments

Recent advances in 3D reconstruction and tracking technologies have made it possible to volumetrically capture human body and performance at real time. In the field of human-computer interaction, however, no works have been reported on the user study made with such volumetric capture avatars. This paper investigates how the volumetric capture avatar affects users' sense of social presence in immersive virtual environments. In our experiments, the volumetric capture avatar of an actor is compared with the actor captured in 2D video and another 3D avatar obtained by pre-scanning the actor. The experiment results show that users have the highest sense of social presence with the volumetric capture avatar when performing dynamic tasks whereas they have higher sense of social presence with the volumetric capture avatar and 2D video than with the pre-scanned avatar when performing static tasks. These imply that the emerging volumetric capture techniques can be an attractive tool for mixed reality, telepresence, and many other 3D applications.