Are We in This Together? Investigating the Relationship of Avatar Customisation, Social Presence, and Communication Outcomes in Collaborative Embodied Virtual Reality

Social virtual reality (VR) enables embodied interactions with others within 3D environments. There has been a growing amount of research on avatar appearance and its influence on social presence and user behaviour, including communicative outcomes. As the focus has often been on the effects of avatar-related intrapersonal processes, it would be necessary to shed more light on the influence of interpersonal processes behind dynamic avatar-mediated interaction. This research aimed to investigate the effects of avatar customisation on social presence and perceived relational messages during a collaborative puzzle task in immersive social VR. The strictly controlled between-subject laboratory experiment (N = 50) with two body-tracked avatar conditions (Custom vs. Assigned) was conducted. Results do not indicate that avatar customisation has a significant effect on social presence or relational communication in the collaborative task-related context. However, it is worth noting that participants in both conditions presented markedly high social presence scores and rated partners' relational messages positively, which might have introduced a ceiling effect diminishing any potential difference in social presence between the conditions.