Capability at a Glance: Design Guidelines for Intuitive Avatars Communicating Augmented Actions in Virtual Reality

TL;DR

16 guidelines to provide general and category-specific recommendations for avatar design are formed and it is demonstrated the applicability of the guidelines in avatar design for four VR applications.

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) enables users to engage with capabilities beyond human limitations, but it is not always obvious how to trigger these capabilities. Taking the lens of Affordance, we believe avatar design is the key to solving this issue, which ideally should communicate its capabilities and how to activate them. To understand the current practice, we selected eight capabilities across four categories and invited twelve professional designers to design avatars that communicate the capabilities and their corresponding interactions. From the resulting designs, we formed 16 guidelines to provide general and category-specific recommendations. Then, we validated these guidelines by letting two groups of twelve participants design avatars with and without guidelines. Participants rated the guidelines' clarity and usefulness highly. External judges confirmed that avatars designed with the guidelines were more intuitive in conveying the capabilities and interaction methods. Finally, we demonstrated the applicability of the guidelines in avatar design for four VR applications.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: Overview of the paper structure. We followed a three-stage process: (1) Guideline Development: we classified augmented actions and conducted a design study with twelve experts to sythesize avatar design guideliens; (2) Guideline Evaluation: two groups of twelve participants designed avatars with and without guidelines, and forty-eight external judges evaluated their intuitiveness; and (3) VR Implementation: four avatars designed with guidelines were implemented in four VR scenarios and twelve participants experienced them in a user study.
• Figure 2: This figure showcases four avatars designed by experts in the formative study, each representing one of the four categories of augmented actions.
• Figure 3: This figure presents the example table of guidelines, where each guideline is accompanied by two illustrative examples. This material was provided to participants in the guideline group to aid their design process.
• Figure 4: Guideline group and non-guideline group ratings with standard deviation on guidelines' clarity and usefulness.
• Figure 5: General audiences’ evaluation results on the intuitiveness of avatars designed with and without guidelines across four augmented action categories. The top chart shows the average capability inference accuracy with standard errors. The middle chart presents the average capability intuitiveness ratings, and the bottom chart shows the average interaction intuitiveness ratings, both with standard errors.