Design and Evaluation of Abstract Aggregated Avatars in VR Workspaces

Avatars are commonly used in digital platforms to provide a visual representation of individual users to each other. Generally, avatar design in the past has focused on achieving visual fidelity and realism of social interactions. In this paper, we broaden the concept of avatars to incorporate displays using an abstract visual language and conveying information on aggregated, interpersonal information from the perspective of the digital platform as a whole. We propose a general design methodology for such aggregated avatars, and also introduce and experimentally evaluate an aggregated avatar which we have developed on the MaxWhere VR platform. Results are promising in that users were able to discern several key states of the avatar and correctly associate them with the correct virtual reality scenarios in a statistically meaningful way.