Effects of Locomotion Style and Body Visibility of a Telepresence Avatar

Telepresence avatars enable users in different environments to interact with each other. In order to increase the effectiveness of these interactions, however, the movements of avatars must be adjusted accordingly to account for differences between user environments. For instance, if a user moves from one point to another in one environment, the avatar’s locomotion speed must be adjusted to move to the corresponding target point in another environment at the same time. Several locomotion styles can be used to achieve this speed change. This paper investigates how different avatar locomotion styles (speed, stride, and glide), body visibility levels (full body and head-to-knee), and views (front views and side views) influence human perceptions of the naturalness of motion, similarity to the user’s locomotion, and the degree of preserving the user’s intention. Our results indicate that 1) speed and stride styles are perceived as more natural than the glide style, while the glide style is more intention-preserving than the others, 2) a greater locomotion speed of the avatar is perceived as more natural, similar, and intention-preserving than slower motion, 3) the perception of naturalness has the greatest impact on people’s preferences for locomotion styles, and that 4) head-to-knee body visibility may enhance the perception of naturalness for the glide style.