The visual representation of human-like entities in virtual worlds is becoming a very important aspect as virtual reality becomes more and more “social”. The visual representation of a character’s resemblance to a real person and the emotional response to it, as well as the expectations raised, have been a topic of discussion for several decades and have been debated by scientists from different disciplines. But as with any new technology, the findings may need to be reevaluated and adapted to new modalities. In this context, we make two contributions which may have implications for how avatars should be represented in social virtual reality applications. First, we determine how default and customized characters of current social virtual reality platforms appear in terms of human likeness, eeriness, and likability, and whether there is a clear resemblance to a given person. It can be concluded that the investigated platforms vary strongly in their representation of avatars. Common to all is that a clear resemblance does not exist. Second, we show that the uncanny valley effect is also present in head-mounted displays, but—compared to 2D monitors—even more pronounced.

随着虚拟现实变得越来越“社交”，虚拟世界中类人实体的视觉表现正成为一个非常重要的方面。角色与真人相似的视觉表现和对它的情感反应，以及所提出的期望，几十年来一直是讨论的话题，并受到来自不同学科的科学家的争论。但与任何新技术一样，这些发现可能需要重新评估并适应新的模式。在这种情况下，我们做出了两项贡献，这可能会影响化身在社交虚拟现实应用程序中的表现方式。首先，我们确定当前社交虚拟现实平台的默认和自定义角色在人类相似度、怪异度和可爱度方面的表现，以及是否与给定的人有明显的相似之处。可以得出结论，所调查的平台在化身的表示方面差异很大。所有人的共同点是不存在明显的相似之处。其次，我们展示了头戴式显示器中也存在恐怖谷效应，但是——与 2D 显示器相比——更为明显。