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Shape of You: Implications of Social Context and Avatar Body Shape on Relatedness, Emotions, and Performance in a Virtual Reality Workout

Jana Franceska Funke, Ria Matapurkar, Enrico Rukzio, Teresa Hirzle

TL;DR

This study investigates how social context (teammate vs. opponent) and avatar body shape (slim, muscular, obese) along with visual sex cues (cis-female vs cis-male) shape relatedness, emotional experience, and performance during VR workouts. Using a within-subject design (N=48), twelve conditions and a comprehensive battery of measures (IOS, IMI, SEES, SAM, subjective emotions, heart rate, and sit-up performance) were employed. Key findings show that teammate contexts generally enhance relatedness and can reduce negative emotions, while slim and muscular avatars tend to boost performance though can elevate certain negative emotions; obese avatars can dampen negative emotions but may hamper performance. Participant-dependent factors such as attraction, identification, sport motivation, and gender further modulate these effects, enabling a prediction tool and practical design guidelines for shaping social VR exercise experiences. The work highlights practical design implications and ethical considerations for using avatar customization in VR fitness to balance motivation, emotion, and performance.

Abstract

It is obvious that emotions are causal variables of motivation, as they elicit states, forces and energies that trigger and guide labor behavior. Thus, a motivational tension that is not informed by needs alone, but also by emotions, intention, goals and means to achieve them is therefore generated within the mental, emotional and physical plane. Based on Montserrat's opinion (2004: 131), that "to motivate means, above all, to move and to transmit an emotion", we will undertake to identify the mutual influences between emotions and motivation. The main objectives of this article are to display a summary of the theories and definitions about emotions and to explore the links between emotions and motivation. Although interconnected, emotions and motivation can be contemplated from a double perspective: (1) emotions influence motivation and (2) motivation influences emotions. Moreover, we will consider motivation from three dimensions: (1) cognitive, (2) affective and (3) volitional. The ultimate purpose of this article is to issue a warning as to the importance of the emotional side of motivation. An important part in implementing such insight is to be played by managers (and by employees, also), who should develop the skills and know-how needed to keep a well-balanced emotional climate that effectively favors the maximization of individual and group motivation at the workplace.

Shape of You: Implications of Social Context and Avatar Body Shape on Relatedness, Emotions, and Performance in a Virtual Reality Workout

TL;DR

This study investigates how social context (teammate vs. opponent) and avatar body shape (slim, muscular, obese) along with visual sex cues (cis-female vs cis-male) shape relatedness, emotional experience, and performance during VR workouts. Using a within-subject design (N=48), twelve conditions and a comprehensive battery of measures (IOS, IMI, SEES, SAM, subjective emotions, heart rate, and sit-up performance) were employed. Key findings show that teammate contexts generally enhance relatedness and can reduce negative emotions, while slim and muscular avatars tend to boost performance though can elevate certain negative emotions; obese avatars can dampen negative emotions but may hamper performance. Participant-dependent factors such as attraction, identification, sport motivation, and gender further modulate these effects, enabling a prediction tool and practical design guidelines for shaping social VR exercise experiences. The work highlights practical design implications and ethical considerations for using avatar customization in VR fitness to balance motivation, emotion, and performance.

Abstract

It is obvious that emotions are causal variables of motivation, as they elicit states, forces and energies that trigger and guide labor behavior. Thus, a motivational tension that is not informed by needs alone, but also by emotions, intention, goals and means to achieve them is therefore generated within the mental, emotional and physical plane. Based on Montserrat's opinion (2004: 131), that "to motivate means, above all, to move and to transmit an emotion", we will undertake to identify the mutual influences between emotions and motivation. The main objectives of this article are to display a summary of the theories and definitions about emotions and to explore the links between emotions and motivation. Although interconnected, emotions and motivation can be contemplated from a double perspective: (1) emotions influence motivation and (2) motivation influences emotions. Moreover, we will consider motivation from three dimensions: (1) cognitive, (2) affective and (3) volitional. The ultimate purpose of this article is to issue a warning as to the importance of the emotional side of motivation. An important part in implementing such insight is to be played by managers (and by employees, also), who should develop the skills and know-how needed to keep a well-balanced emotional climate that effectively favors the maximization of individual and group motivation at the workplace.
Paper Structure (72 sections, 19 figures, 11 tables)

This paper contains 72 sections, 19 figures, 11 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Motivational Factors for Exercise
  4. Social Factors and Relatedness
  5. Well-being and Emotions
  6. Performance
  7. Competition and Collaboration During Exercising
  8. Effects of Visual Body Shape of Virtual Avatars
  9. Influence of Visual Sex and Gender in VR
  10. Implementation
  11. Hardware and Software Setup
  12. Agent Body Design
  13. Evaluation
  14. Research Questions
  15. Conditions
  16. ...and 57 more sections

Figures (19)

  • Figure 1: The Figure shows the VR scene of the study. The virtual room was designed to be calm and not distracting but at the same time, not boringly empty.
  • Figure 2: The six agents participants had to compete against or work out with. The upper row shows the female-shaped agents, and the bottom row shows the male-shaped agent. From left to right, the agents represent a slim, muscular, and obese body type. The scanty clothing was chosen to emphasize the different body shapes.
  • Figure 3: The figure shows how we counterbalanced our study conditions to avoid learning and tiredness effects. While the teammate and opponent social contexts were swapped in blocks for each participant, the six different avatars were rotated according to a Latin square within these blocks. Each row represents a participant's run. After the sixth row, it was repeated, starting from the first row with the next participant. The green color refers to the Teammate scenarios, while the blue refers to the Opponent scenarios. After the twelve rows, the next participant started with the first row again.
  • Figure 4: The figure shows a visualized version of the procedure as a flow chart.
  • Figure 5: a) The plots show different mean values for each group in relatedness variables. The long line in the middle is the overall mean, while the group means of the two levels from social context, the three levels of body type and the two levels of sex are shown as differences towards the overall mean. The red circle marks where main effects occurred and if they were positive or negative. b) The plots show the interaction between two of the three levels. The red circle marks where interaction effects occurred and if they were positive or negative.
  • ...and 14 more figures