Effect of Avatar Facial Expressiveness on Team Collaboration in Virtual Reality.

This paper investigates the impact of displaying the facial expressions of a user in real time on the performance of the task, the social presence and the behavioral changes of the users interacting in a Virtual Reality environment. To evaluate this approach, we conducted a study where the users collaborated to build a TV stand in dyad including a novice and an expert assistant. The collaborative task was divided into two independent phases: a face-to-face discussion phase without object manipulation, and a furniture assembly phase with object manipulation. Our results indicate that the proposed approach can increase social presence and lead to gaze behavior changes in multi-user environments during the face-to-face phase.