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The effects of avatars on co-presence in a collaborative virtual environment

Presence in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) can be divided into personal presence and co-presence. Personal presence is having a feeling of “being there” in the CVE oneself. Co-presence is having a feeling that one is in the same place as the other participants, and that one is collaborating with real people. We investigated the effects that avatar realism and functionality (in terms of simple gestures and facial expressions) have on co-presence in a collaborative virtual environment, by means of two small group behaviour experiments with 18 participants each. We measured co-presence subjectively, using a co-presence questionnaire that we developed. We found that there was a significant difference between the co-presence scores generated by avatars of different degrees of realism in their appearance. More realistic avatars generated higher levels of co-presence. We also found that avatars having gestures and facial expressions produced a significantly higher level of co-presence when compared to static avatars. We were not able to find the correlation between presence and co-presence reported in some studies.