According to research by Jeremy Bailenson, a Stanford University professor of communication in the School of Humanities and Sciences and founding director of the university’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, participants who have an experience using an augmented reality (AR) headset alter their interactions with people and objects, even after the headset has been removed.
“We’ve discovered that using augmented reality technology can change where you walk, how you turn your head, how well you do on tasks, and how you connect socially with other physical people in the room,” said Bailenson, who co-authored the paper with graduate students Mark Roman Miller, Hanseul Jun and Fernanda Herrera, who are the lead authors.
To research how AR affected the ways in which people behaved in social situations, the research team recruited 218 participants for three experiments. The first experiment aimed to replicate a traditional psychology finding known as social inhibition, wherein with the presence of observers, people can easily complete simple tasks, but struggle to perform complex or unfamiliar ones. Participants has to complete anagrams while they were observed by a realistic virtual avatar named Chris, who was visible in the field of view of their HoloLens. The results confirmed the social inhibition theory, with participants finishing simple anagrams easily but struggled with harder ones.
The second experiment tested whether or not participants would follow social cues when interacting with Chris, which was measured by seeing if they would sit on a chair that Chris previously sat on. Researchers found that all participants who wore the HoloLens sat on the empty chair next to Chris instead of sitting right on the avatar. Of those participants who were asked to take off the headset before choosing their seat, 72 percent still chose to sit in the empty chair next to where Chris sat previously.
“The fact that not a single one of the subjects with headsets took the seat where the avatar sat was a bit of a surprise,” Bailenson said. “These results highlight how AR content integrates with your physical space, affecting the way you interact with it. The presence of AR content also appears to linger after the goggles are taken off.”
In the third study, researchers examined how AR affects the social connection between two people who are having a conversation while one of them wears an AR headset. Researchers found that those wearing AR goggles reported feeling less socially connected to their conversation partner.
“This paper scratches the surface of the social-psychological costs and benefits of AR use, but much research is needed to understand the effects of this technology as it scales,” the researchers wrote.
The effect that virtual humans can play when teaching social interactions and soft skills brings out extended reality’s (XR) true potential. Companies like Talespin are already achieving great success with their own virtual human technology for soft skills in the workplace, and Microsoft’s integration of Spatial for the HoloLens 2 also demonstrate how human interaction in AR can streamline the way that we work.
