IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July 2018 - 45

for Samsung Gear VR, Oculus Rift, iPhone, and Google VR;
whereas AltspaceVR, a software company that develops solutions for social VR environments, began developing marketable VR content in 2013 in anticipation of the release of
head-mounted displays (HMDs).
In April 2017, Facebook introduced Facebook Spaces, a
VR application version of Facebook launched for Oculus Rift
and Touch. These companies refer to their software as social
VR, since these web-based, immersive virtual worlds enable
users to virtually interact with one another under the mediation of a virtual body (VB).
Considering the amount of marketable VR software and
content currently under development, along with an unspoken
demand for all electronics to be interplayable and smart, the
establishment of VR as yet another social medium for Internet-based communication is a reasonable adaptation. Although
still under development, motion control and haptic feedback
will soon become affordable enough to add as expansions to
many immersive VR systems. It is therefore imperative that
we examine the possible effects of experiencing VR as uncharted, social virtual environments (VEs) that facilitate
social interaction.
Due to the nature of VR systems, however, the ability for
individuals to engage in virtual social behavior is preceded
by various technical and contextual prerequisites, the most
dominant being presence and body ownership illusion (BOI).
Achieving presence, i.e., the sense of being there, is mandatory for users to fully transcend their mental awareness into
an immersive VE. Whereas BOI, i.e., the perception that a
VB substitutes a real body in real time, allows the virtual
incorporation of the body as one of the most important communication tools in most social engagements.
In this article, we investigate the effect of social context
on user perception of the VB, as well as on the emotional and
psychological state of the user; we also examine determinants
of human behavior in shared immersive VEs. To pursue our
research objectives, we executed an experiment in which participants acted as customers in a virtual clothing store and
were asked to try on an outfit in front of one of the two
reflective mirrors available. The first mirror was placed in the
central open area of the store, and the second mirror was
placed behind a curtain that functioned as a dressing room.
Regardless of which mirror the participants chose, trying on
the outfit caused their avatars to undress, exposing a nude VB
with realistic genitalia.
This was a comparative study between three groups of participants, with each group experiencing a different experimental condition. The first group did not encounter other characters
in the virtual space. The second and third groups encountered a
virtual salesman, who, for the second group, was a nonplayer
character (NPC) and, for the third group, was an avatar motion
controlled by an actor via a full-body motion-capture suit.
Since participants were not previously warned about the exposure of the naked VB, we were able to examine their initial
reaction and any kind of fluctuation regarding presence, BOI,
and emotional state as a result of the three conditions.

Our research contributes to the current VR conceptualizations by highlighting that the social context of an immersive
VE has an affective impact on users and thus, should be taken
into consideration for the effective design of shared and collaborative VR environments employed in various applications.

Related ReseaRch
As a field of research, VR encompasses far more than its everpresent technical challenges. In fact, even defining a VR environment has been an arduous task. For instance, in 1991, Ellis
defined VR environments as "interactive, virtual image displays enhanced by special processing and by non-visual display modalities, such as auditory and haptic, to convince users
that they are immersed in a synthetic space" [5]. Such definitions were primarily concerned with the technological system,
and thus lacked an analytical framework. For that purpose,
presence as transportation, i.e., the sense of being there, was
introduced. However, no unequivocal definition can be found
for presence either, possibly confirming Kalawsky's view that
it is an "umbrella term for many interrelated perceptual and
psychological factors" [5]. As previously mentioned, our
research is motivated from the belief that VR will eventually
turn into a social medium, with shared VEs facilitating social
interaction. Therefore, potentially affective factors may be
examined through the VB and social presence.
The VB refers to the process of self-representation, which
works by mapping real-body movements and aligning them
with a three-dimensional (3-D) avatar's body movements.
This process may result in users feeling not only that the avatar's body is a representation of their own, but that they are
that avatar, in which case, BOI has been achieved. Initial studies attempted to generate ownership illusion for specific
limbs, such as hands or arms [6], [7], as an extension to Botvinick and Cohen's original Rubber Hand experiment, in which
vision, touch, and proprioception were manipulated into
achieving the illusion of ownership of a fake rubber hand [8].
Gradually, full BOI was achieved and participants were
tricked into perceiving that a virtual entity of any ethnicity,
gender, or size could be them [9]-[11].
Social presence, as defined by Short, Williams, and Christie, determines the degree of salience of the other person in
the interaction and the consequent salience of the interpersonal relationships [12]. In other words, social presence is a
measurement of behavioral and emotional response during
(and due to) social interaction with another individual. However, the term was initially coined in relation to communication studies, wherein the actual communication medium has
been, and still is, the most important aspect of the discourse
(e.g., face-to-face, telephone, synchronous, or asynchronous
computer-mediated-communication, and so on) [13]. In VRrelated research, social presence is often synonymous with
copresence, which is defined as the sense of being together
[5], [14]. This approach, although correct in its own right,
does not, in fact, measure the level of social presence. Furthermore, this approach does not regard the VE as a communication medium with a potential affective impact.
July 2018

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