ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Virtual Real.
Sec. Technologies for VR
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frvir.2025.1594350
This article is part of the Research TopicUnlocking the potential of XR: Shaping a pro-social metaverseView all articles
Eye-to-Eye or Face-to-Face? Face and Head Substitution for Co-Located AR
Provisionally accepted
- 1Human-Computer Interaction Group, Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany
- 2Computer Graphics Group, Technical University Dortmund, Dortmund, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
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In co-located eXtended Reality (XR) experiences, headsets occlude their wearers' facial expressions, impeding natural conversation. We introduce two techniques to mitigate this, using off-the-shelf hardware: compositing a view of a personalized avatar behind the visor ("see-through visor"), and diminishing the headset and showing the avatar's head ("head substitution"). We evaluated them in a repeated-measures dyadic study (N=25) that indicated promising effects. Collaboration with a confederate with our techniques, when compared to a no-avatar baseline, showed quicker consensus in a judgment task and aided perceived mutual understanding. However, the avatar was also rated and commented on as uncanny, but participant comments also indicate tolerance forof avatar uncanniness since they restore gaze utility. Further, performance in an executive task deteriorated in the presence of our techniques, indicating that our implementation drew participant attention to their partner's avatar and away from the task.We suggest giving users agency over how these techniques are applied and recommend using the same representation across interaction partners to avoid power imbalances.
Keywords: Co-presence, diminished reality, Mixed reality, augmented reality, virtual reality, Avatars
Received: 15 Mar 2025; Accepted: 30 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kullmann, Schell, Botsch and Latoschik. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Peter Kullmann, Human-Computer Interaction Group, Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany
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