Effects of Avatar’s Symbolic Gesture in Virtual Reality Brainstorming

Avatar-mediated communication in virtual reality (VR) is challenging when compared to face-to-face communication, particularly, for expressing users’ intentions to others. This is due, in part, to the technological medium’s restriction of nonverbal communication cues, including gesture and facial expression. In platforms for social VR, there are interfaces that allow users to express their intentions through their avatars by selecting several given symbolic gestures, e.g., ”good” and ”surprise”. However, little is known about the effects of the symbolic gestures on communication. We investigate the effects of symbolic gestures on communication in VR and conducted user experiment with brainstorming tasks in three different conditions: VR with symbolic gestures, VR without symbolic gestures, and face-to-face. Our results showed significant differences in several items of the participants’ subjective questionnaires, i.e., participants reported that symbolic gestures helped them to express their intentions and feelings more easily than the other conditions. It means symbolic gestures improve social presence on communication in VR.