The research presented in this paper explores the contribution of avatar fidelity to social interaction in virtual environments and how sensory fusion can improve these interactions. Specifically, we vary levels of interaction fidelity to investigate how responsiveness and behavioural realism affect people’s experience of interacting with virtual humans. This is accomplished through the creation of Cinemacraft, a technology-mediated immersive platform for collaborative human–computer interaction. Cinemacraft leverages a voxel game engine similar to Minecraft to facilitate collaborative interaction in a virtual 3D world and incorporates sensory fusion to improve the fidelity of real-time collaboration. The primary hypothesis of the study is that embodied interactions result in a higher degree of presence, and that sensory fusion can improve the quality of presence and co-presence. We tested our hypothesis through a user-study of 24 participants. Based on suggestions from existing literature, we sidestep the uncanny valley effect through the use of low fidelity avatars (a la Minecraft) and identify cues that impact users ratings of presence, co-presence and successful collaboration. The findings and ensuing data in this research can be applied to produce a more compelling platform for live collaborative interactions, performances, and empathetic storytelling. This research contributes to the field of immersive, collaborative interaction by making transparent the platform, methodology, instruments and code accessible for team members with less technological expertise, as well as developers aspiring to use interactive 3D media to promote further experimentation and conceptual discussions.

中文翻译：

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Cinemacraft：在协作虚拟世界互动中探索保真线索

本文提出的研究探索了虚拟环境中虚拟形象逼真度对社交互动的贡献，以及感官融合如何改善这些互动。具体而言，我们改变了交互逼真度的级别，以研究响应性和行为现实主义如何影响人们与虚拟人交互的体验。这可以通过创建Cinemacraft来实现，Cinemacraft是一种技术介导的沉浸式平台，用于人机协作。Cinemacraft利用类似于Minecraft的体素游戏引擎来促进虚拟3D世界中的协作交互，并结合了感官融合以提高实时协作的保真度。该研究的主要假设是，具体化的互动会导致更高的存在度，感觉融合可以提高存在和共处的质量。我们通过对24位参与者的用户研究来检验我们的假设。根据现有文献的建议，我们通过使用低逼真化身（la Minecraft）来回避异常谷效应，并找出影响用户在场，共同存在和成功协作等级的线索。这项研究中的发现和后续数据可用于为现场协作互动，表演和善解人意的故事讲述提供一个更具吸引力的平台。这项研究通过使平台，方法论，工具和代码透明化，使技术专家较少的团队成员能够访问，从而为沉浸式协作互动领域做出了贡献，