Effective collaboration in immersive virtual environments requires to be able to communicate flawlessly using both verbal and non-verbal communication. We present two experiments investigating the impact of facial anthropomorphism on the sense of body ownership, avatar attractiveness, social presence and performance in two collaborative tasks. In the first experiment participants have to solve a construction game according to their partner’s instructions using three avatars presenting different facial properties. Results reveal no significant difference in terms of body ownership and social presence, but demonstrate significant differences in terms of attractiveness and completion duration of the collaborative task. Unexpectedly, correlation analyses also reveal a link between attractiveness and performance. The more attractive the avatar, the shorter the completion duration of the game. Our second experiment was designed to investigate further the potential impact of the task carried out on the sense of social presence using the same avatars. While we observed a very high sense of social presence in both tasks (asymmetric collaboration and negotiation) with every avatar, our results did not reveal significant difference between the three conditions. However, we observed statistically significant differences between the two task types. The scores of the co-presence and of the perceived message understanding dimensions of social presence were higher during the negotiation task. The sense of social presence appears to be task sensitive, especially when non-verbal communication becomes more important during face-to-face interaction in immersive collaborative virtual environments.

沉浸式虚拟环境中的有效协作需要能够使用语言和非语言交流进行完美的交流。我们提出了两个实验，研究面部拟人化对身体所有权感、化身吸引力、社会存在感和两个协作任务中的表现的影响。在第一个实验中，参与者必须根据合作伙伴的指示，使用呈现不同面部特征的三个化身来解决构建游戏。结果表明，在身体所有权和社会存在方面没有显着差异，但在吸引力和协作任务的完成持续时间方面显示出显着差异。出乎意料的是，相关性分析还揭示了吸引力和绩效之间的联系。越有魅力的头像，游戏完成时间越短。我们的第二个实验旨在进一步研究使用相同头像执行的任务对社会存在感的潜在影响。虽然我们在每个化身的两个任务（非对称协作和谈判）中都观察到了非常高的社会临场感，但我们的结果并没有揭示这三种情况之间的显着差异。但是，我们观察到两种任务类型之间存在统计学上的显着差异。在谈判任务中，共同存在和社会存在的感知信息理解维度的分数更高。社交临场感似乎对任务敏感，尤其是在沉浸式协作虚拟环境中的面对面互动中，非语言交流变得更加重要时。