Transformed Social Interaction in Virtual Environments

本研究的主要目的是了解和测试在协作虚拟环境中的中介通信理论。它将研究人类如何适应现代通信和社交互动系统中快速发展的数字技术。这项工作将探索超出我们通常认为的正常，中介沟通的界限，而是深入研究一种称为转换社交互动的现象，这种策略允许用户系统地过滤他们的外表和社交行为（如化身所代表的）在他们的对话伙伴的眼中，实时放大或抑制特征和非语言信号，用于说服、学习、记忆和喜好等战略目的。这一目标将通过使用公认的方法来研究使用网络虚拟现实技术的多人社交互动来实现，研究将集中在三类转换上：自我表征（改变化身的外观、声音和非语言行为），社会-感觉能力（为互动者提供工具，提供独特的视角和对他人社会行为的最新总结）和社会环境（改变社会背景的方面以最大化交互目标）.转换的社会交互不仅与协作虚拟环境有关，而且与使用人的数字表示的任何形式的通信介质有关-手机，视频会议，文本聊天室，在线视频游戏和许多其他形式的数字媒体。目前，每天有超过6000万人使用互联网聊天。在韩国，据估计，1/20的总人口花费大量时间在与其他人的数字表示进行交互的在线视频游戏中。手机无处不在，现在包括数字照片和视频功能。公司实际上提供面部跟踪和渲染手机头像。在任何有另一个人的数字表示的通信媒介中，转变的社会互动不仅是可能的，而且是不可避免的。使用转换的社会互动有可能彻底改变远程教育，通信实践，政治竞选和广告的性质。因此，了解这些转变的有效性以及人们发现它们的能力至关重要。

The major goal of this research is to understand and test theories of mediated communication in collaborative virtual environments. It will examine how well humans are adapting to the quickly evolving digital technologies used in modern communication and social interaction systems. This work will explore the boundaries that are beyond what we normally consider normal, mediated communication and instead delve into a phenomenon called Transformed Social Interaction, a strategy that allows users to systematically filter their physical appearance and social behaviors (as represented by avatars) in the eyes of their conversational partners, amplifying or suppressing features and nonverbal signals in real-time for strategic purposes such as persuasion, learning, memory, and liking. This goal will be accomplished by using well-accepted methods to study multi-person social interaction using networked virtual reality technology, and the research will focus on three categories of transformations: Self representation (altering an avatar's appearance, voice, and nonverbal behavior), Social-Sensory abilities (giving interactants tools that provide unique perspectives and up-to-date summaries of the social behaviors of others) and Social Environment (changing aspects of the social context to maximize interaction goals).Transformed Social Interaction is relevant not just to collaborative virtual environments but to any form of communication medium that uses digital representations of people - cell phones, videoconferences, textual chat rooms, online videogames, and many other forms of digital media. Currently, over 60 million people use Internet chat per day. In Korea, it is estimated that 1/20th of the general population spend a significant amount of time in online video games interacting with digital representations of other people. Cell phones are ubiquitous and now include digital photograph and video capabilities. Companies actually offer face tracking and rendering on cell phone avatars. In any communication medium in which there is a digital representation of another person, transformed social interaction is not only possible, it is inevitable. The use of transformed social interaction has the potential to drastically change the nature of distance education, communication practices, political campaigning, and advertising. Consequently, it is crucial to understand both the effectiveness of these transformations as well as people's ability to detect them.