The Impact of Avatar Retargeting on Pointing and Conversational Communication

One of the pleasures of interacting using avatars in VR is being able to play a character very different to yourself. As the scale of characters change relative to a user, there is a need to retarget user motions onto the character, generally maintaining either the user's pose or the position of their wrists and ankles. This retargeting can impact both the functional and social information conveyed by the avatar. Focused on 3rd-person (observed) avatars, this paper presents three studies on these varied aspects of communication. It establishes a baseline for near-field avatar pointing, showing an accuracy of about 5cm. This can be maintained using positional hand constraints, but increases if the user's pose is directly transferred to the character. It is possible to maintain this accuracy with a Semantic Inverse Kinematics formulation that brings the avatar closer to the user's actual pose, but compensates by adjusting the finger pointing direction. Similar results are shown for conveying spatial information, namely object size. The choice of pose or position based retargeting leads to a small change in the perception of avatar personality, indicating an impact on social communication. This effect was not observed in a task where the users' cognitive load was otherwise high, so may be task dependent. It could also become more pronounced for more extreme proportion changes.