Observing the Uncanny Valley: Gender Differences in Perceptions of Avatar Uncanniness

Jacqueline Bailey, Karen Blackmore, Robert King

2022

Abstract

The creation of avatars is a two-sided coin; on one side we see developers creating avatars with the skills, time, and resources available to them. However, these resources (or lack thereof) may lead to avatars falling into the uncanny valley. On the other side are the end-users who engage with the avatar, who ultimately are the focus for these designers and developers. However, many factors can influence the perception of any avatar created beyond the level of realism, including the physical appearance of the avatar or something more fundamental like its gender(sex). Currently, there is a gap in understanding of the influence of gender(sex) in avatar uncanniness perceptions, and this is mostly missing in design decisions for avatar systems. Bridging this gap has been a source of research focus spanning the development of new technologies for avatar development to measuring end-user perceptions of those avatars. Here we add to this discussion through an experiment involving a set of avatars presented to participants (n = 2065) who were asked to rank them from least to most uncanny based on their perceptions. This representative set of avatars were sourced from publicly available methods and have different levels of realism. Our findings indicate that perceptions of avatar uncanniness based on gender(sex) affects the overall perception of the avatar.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Bailey J., Blackmore K. and King R. (2022). Observing the Uncanny Valley: Gender Differences in Perceptions of Avatar Uncanniness. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications - Volume 1: CHIRA, ISBN 978-989-758-609-5, pages 209-216. DOI: 10.5220/0011576000003323

in Bibtex Style

@conference{chira22,
author={Jacqueline Bailey and Karen Blackmore and Robert King},
title={Observing the Uncanny Valley: Gender Differences in Perceptions of Avatar Uncanniness},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications - Volume 1: CHIRA,},
year={2022},
pages={209-216},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0011576000003323},
isbn={978-989-758-609-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications - Volume 1: CHIRA,
TI - Observing the Uncanny Valley: Gender Differences in Perceptions of Avatar Uncanniness
SN - 978-989-758-609-5
AU - Bailey J.
AU - Blackmore K.
AU - King R.
PY - 2022
SP - 209
EP - 216
DO - 10.5220/0011576000003323