Evaluating the Effect of Outfit on Personality Perception in Virtual Characters

Designing virtual characters that are capable of reflecting a sense of personality is a key goal in research and applications in virtual reality and computer graphics. More and more research efforts are dedicated to investigating approaches to construct a diverse, equitable, and inclusive metaverse by infusing expressive personalities and styles into virtual avatars. While most previous work focused on exploring variations in virtual characters’ dynamic behaviors, characters’ visual appearance plays a crucial role in affecting their perceived personalities. This paper presents a series of experiments evaluating the effect of virtual characters’ outfits on their perceived personality. Based on the related psychology research conducted in the real world, we determined a set of outfit factors likely to reflect personality in virtual characters: color, design, and type. As a framework for our study, we used the “Big Five” personality model for evaluating personality traits. To test our hypothesis, we conducted three perceptual experiments to evaluate the outfit parameters’ contributions to the characters’ personality. In our first experiment, we studied the color factor by varying color hue, saturation, and value; in the second experiment, we evaluated the impact of different neckline, waistline, and sleeve designs; and in our third experiment, we examined the personality perception of five outfit types: professional, casual, fashionable, outdoor, and indoor. Significant results offer guidance to avatar designers on how to create virtual characters with specific personality profiles. We further conducted a verification test to extend the application of our findings to animated virtual characters in augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) settings. Results confirmed that our findings can be broadly applied to both static and animated virtual characters in VR and AR environments that are commonly used in games, entertainment, and social networking scenarios.