Exploring the Influence of Virtual Avatar Heads in Mixed Reality on Social Presence, Performance and User Experience in Collaborative Tasks

In Mixed Reality (MR), users' heads are largely (if not completely) occluded by the MR Head-Mounted Display (HMD) they are wearing. As a consequence, one cannot see their facial expressions and other communication cues when interacting locally. In this paper, we investigate how displaying virtual avatars' heads on-top of the (HMD-occluded) heads of participants in a Video See-Through (VST) Mixed Reality local collaborative task could improve their collaboration as well as social presence. We hypothesized that virtual heads would convey more communicative cues (such as eye direction or facial expressions) hidden by the MR HMDs and lead to better collaboration and social presence. To do so, we conducted a between-subject study ($\mathrm{n}=88$) with two independent variables: the type of avatar (CartoonAvatar/RealisticAvatar/NoAvatar) and the level of facial expressions provided (HighExpr/LowExpr). The experiment involved two dyadic communication tasks: (i) the "20-question" game where one participant asks questions to guess a hidden word known by the other participant and (ii) a urban planning problem where participants have to solve a puzzle by collaborating. Each pair of participants performed both tasks using a specific type of avatar and facial animation. Our results indicate that while adding an avatar's head does not necessarily improve social presence, the amount of facial expressions provided through the social interaction does have an impact. Moreover, participants rated their performance higher when observing a realistic avatar but rated the cartoon avatars as less uncanny. Taken together, our results contribute to a better understanding of the role of partial avatars in local MR collaboration and pave the way for further research exploring collaboration in different scenarios, with different avatar types or MR setups.