Project overview
In our recent VR dyad study, the strongest predictor of how well a Receiver could decode a Sender’s attention was the Sender’s own behavior: Senders whose chest faithfully pointed at what they attended to were easy to read (correlation of mean chest-to-target offset with Receiver error: rho = .79), with a 2.7-fold accuracy difference between the most and least readable Senders. Readability was not about moving more, but about torso-target fidelity. That immediately suggests an intervention: give Senders real-time feedback on their torso alignment and test whether readability improves.
Project motivation
Unlike changes to avatars or rendering, sender-side training is deployable in any system without touching the receiver’s client. If a few minutes of feedback durably improves readability, that is a cheap, transferable win for avatar-mediated collaboration; if alignment is an inflexible postural habit, systems must compensate on the receiver side instead. Feedback and offset-correction designs from pointing research provide templates for the intervention [1, 2].
Project goals
- Feedback implementation. Build a real-time torso-alignment indicator into the existing Unity environment (for example a subtle HUD meter or color cue visible only to the Sender, driven by the live chest-to-gaze-target offset from the existing pipeline).
- Training experiment. Pre/post design: dyads perform the decoding task, Senders train with feedback (control group without), then dyads are re-tested with feedback off. Measure changes in Sender readability and Receiver accuracy, and whether effects persist.
You will
- Perform a literature review on feedback and posture training in VR
- Implement the real-time feedback in the existing Unity VR environment
- Run a pre/post dyad study with the existing pipeline
- Analyze training effects (readability metrics already implemented)
- Summarize your findings in a thesis and present them to an audience
- (Optional) co-write a research paper
You need
- Strong communication skills in English
- Good knowledge of Unity (UI, live data)
- Interest in experimental design
References
- Mayer, S., Schwind, V., Schweigert, R., & Henze, N. (2018). The effect of offset correction and cursor on mid-air pointing in real and virtual environments. CHI 2018. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174227
- Bailenson, J. N., Beall, A. C., Loomis, J., Blascovich, J., & Turk, M. (2005). Transformed Social Interaction, Augmented Gaze, and Social Influence in Immersive Virtual Environments. Human Communication Research. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.2005.tb00881.x
- The parent study on avatar-mediated shared attention in virtual reality; details are available from the advisor on request.
Keywords: VR, Feedback, Training, Sender Readability, Body Orientation