The role of avatar fidelity and sex on self-motion recognition

Abstract

Avatars are important for games and immersive social media applications. Although avatars are still not complete digital copies of the user, they often aim to represent a user in terms of appearance (color and shape) and motion. Previous studies have shown that humans can recognize their own motions in point-light displays. Here, we investigated whether recognition of self-motion is dependent on the avatar's fidelity and the congruency of the avatar's sex with that of the participants. Participants performed different actions that were captured and subsequently remapped onto three different body representations: a point-light figure, a male, and a female virtual avatar. In the experiment, participants viewed the motions displayed on the three body representations and responded to whether the motion was their own. Our results show that there was no influence of body representation on self-motion recognition performance, participants were equally sensitive to recognize their own motion on the point-light figure and the virtual characters. In line with previous research, recognition performance was dependent on the action. Sensitivity was highest for uncommon actions, such as dancing and playing ping-pong, and was around chance level for running, suggesting that the degree of individuality of performing certain actions affects self-motion recognition performance. Our results show that people were able to recognize their own motions even when individual body shape cues were completely eliminated and when the avatar's sex differed from own. This suggests that people might rely more on kinematic information rather than shape and sex cues for recognizing own motion. This finding has important implications for avatar design in game and immersive social media applications.