“Awesomely freaky!” The impact of type on children's social-emotional perceptions of virtual reality characters

While VR, through decades of research, has shown to successfully improve young children's lives, more research needs to examine the appropriateness of VR for children, including its design. The type of character in combination with the perceptual realism of virtual reality (VR) may influence children's perceptions of VR experiences. A within-participant experiment examined 5- to 9-year-old children's (N = 25) perceptions of three different character types in VR (i.e., human, animal, and anthropomorphized creature) based on their level of social realism. Results showed that character type impacted children's (a) social-emotional descriptions of the VR experience, (b) if VR's realism was an asset or a hindrance, and (c) primed thoughts about fantasy versus reality. However, children experienced the embodiment and personification of the characters similarly across all character types. Finally, children recalled the salient aspects of the characters they remembered and identified elements to improve the VR characters’ design.