Exploring the impact of non-verbal cues on user experience in immersive virtual reality

Face-to-face communication relies extensively on non-verbal cues (NVCs) which complement, or at times dominate, the communicative process as they convey emotions with intense salience, thus definitively affecting interpersonal communication. The capture, transference, and subsequent interpretation of NVCs becomes complicated in computer-mediated communicative processes, particularly in shared virtual worlds, for which there is growing interest both in regard to NVCs technological integration and their affective impact. This paper presents a between-groups experimental setup which is facilitated in immersive virtual reality (IVR), and examines NVCs effects on user experience, with special emphasis on degree of attention toward each NVC as an isolated controlled variable of a scripted performance by a virtual character (VC). This study aims to evaluate NVCs fidelity based on the capabilities of the motion-capture technologies utilized to address cue integration developmental challenges and examines NVCs impact on users' perceived realism of the VC, their empathy toward him, and the degree of social presence experienced. To meet the objectives set the affective impact of low-fidelity automated NVCs and high-fidelity real-time captured NVCs were compared. The findings of the evaluation suggest that although NVCs do impact user experience to an extent, their effects are notably more subtle compared to previous studies.