Transformed Social Interaction in Virtual Environments

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

The major goal of this research is to understand and test theories of mediated communication in collaborative virtual environments. It will examine how well humans are adapting to the quickly evolving digital technologies used in modern communication and social interaction systems. This work will explore the boundaries that are beyond what we normally consider normal, mediated communication and instead delve into a phenomenon called Transformed Social Interaction, a strategy that allows users to systematically filter their physical appearance and social behaviors (as represented by avatars) in the eyes of their conversational partners, amplifying or suppressing features and nonverbal signals in real-time for strategic purposes such as persuasion, learning, memory, and liking. This goal will be accomplished by using well-accepted methods to study multi-person social interaction using networked virtual reality technology, and the research will focus on three categories of transformations: Self representation (altering an avatar's appearance, voice, and nonverbal behavior), Social-Sensory abilities (giving interactants tools that provide unique perspectives and up-to-date summaries of the social behaviors of others) and Social Environment (changing aspects of the social context to maximize interaction goals). Transformed Social Interaction is relevant not just to collaborative virtual environments but to any form of communication medium that uses digital representations of people - cell phones, videoconferences, textual chat rooms, online videogames, and many other forms of digital media. Currently, over 60 million people use Internet chat per day. In Korea, it is estimated that 1/20th of the general population spend a significant amount of time in online video games interacting with digital representations of other people. Cell phones are ubiquitous and now include digital photograph and video capabilities. Companies actually offer face tracking and rendering on cell phone avatars. In any communication medium in which there is a digital representation of another person, transformed social interaction is not only possible, it is inevitable. The use of transformed social interaction has the potential to drastically change the nature of distance education, communication practices, political campaigning, and advertising. Consequently, it is crucial to understand both the effectiveness of these transformations as well as people's ability to detect them.