Emotions at the Push of a Button: A Demonstration of Controllable Facial Expressions in Virtual Reality.

Facial and vocal expressions are vital to conveying emotions and regulating social interaction. In online interactions, avatars are used as proxies for emotional expression, but most avatars do not allow for facial expressions to change in line with the user's conveyed emotions, creating a challenge for naturalness and conversational satisfaction. This demonstration presents a virtual reality application developed for the Meta Quest headset where participants control avatars with four distinct facial expressions (happiness, sadness, anger, and fear) created based on the Facial Action Coding System. Real-time voice communication allows for the coordination of vocal tone with the avatar's facial expression, enabling the study of matched and mismatched emotion cues in conversation. This demonstration highlights how streamlined emotional cues can impact conversational satisfaction of virtual environment interactions without requiring highly detailed avatars.