Work

The Effect of Avatar Transparency on Collaboration in Shared Virtual Spaces

Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: In shared virtual spaces, users tend to mimic real-world social behaviors, such as maintaining interpersonal distances and avoiding collisions. During remote collaboration, these behaviors can limit movement and positioning, despite users are not co-located. Prior work found that avatar transparency reduces users’ positioning constraints induced by social behaviors, as long as social presence between collaborators. Our goal was to develop a system that enhances navigation freedom without significantly increasing social presence. We designed a transparency management system based on interpersonal distances and collision avoidance. A user study involving groups of three remote collaborators indicated that our system reduced the distances between users compared to fully opaque avatars without any significant difference in social presence.
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4417025354
FWCI:
Cites: 7
Cited by: 1
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