Social VR Experimental Environment – Continued Development Virtual Reality technology has opened fascinating possibilities for exploring how our embodied identity shapes social interaction. When we communicate through avatars, we're not merely controlling digital puppets—we're experiencing a form of embodiment that can influence how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us. This project investigates a compelling question: How does communicating through a gender-swapped VR avatar with realistic voice transformation affect our behavior and emotional states during conversations? Avatars in virtual environments serve as our digital representatives, and research has shown that the characteristics of these avatars can significantly influence our behavior—a phenomenon known as the Proteus Effect. When people embody avatars with different physical characteristics, they often begin to behave in ways consistent with stereotypes or expectations associated with those characteristics. Gender presentation is a particularly powerful aspect of identity that shapes social interactions in complex ways, influencing everything from communication styles to how we're perceived and treated by others. By enabling participants to experience conversations through avatars presenting a different gender while hearing their own voice transformed to match, we create conditions to study these dynamics in controlled settings. Building on Prior Work A functional foundation has already been established by a previous group. The current state of the project includes a VR environment replicating our university lab room, two human avatars with hand tracking, and basic multiplayer connectivity. This semester's group will take this raw construction and develop it into a polished, fully operational experimental platform capable of supporting real social VR research. This Semester's Focus The primary goal is to transform the existing prototype into a genuine research environment. This involves several interconnected areas of work: * Environment and Avatar Refinement: The existing lab-room scene and avatars need to be refined and extended. Avatars should be expressive and believable, incorporating facial animations, lip-sync, and body language that respond naturally to speech and movement. * Communication and Networking: Avatar communication needs to be stabilized and refined to ensure smooth, low-latency multiplayer interaction that supports natural conversation flow. * Voice Transformation System: A key addition this semester is the integration of a real-time voice transformation pipeline. Developed in collaboration with DFKI (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence), this system will alter participants' voices to sound natural and gender-congruent with their assigned avatars. The transformed voice must be synchronized with avatar animations and delivered to other participants with minimal latency. * Experimental Study Design: Beyond the technical work, students will engage with the research process itself—designing study protocols, developing conversation scenarios, creating measurement instruments, and planning data collection procedures. The stretch goal is to conduct a pilot study that validates the technical system and potentially contributes to actual research on embodied interaction and gender perception in virtual environments. What You Will Gain This project offers the opportunity to work at the intersection of advanced VR technology, real-time audio processing, and social psychology research. You will gain hands-on experience with cutting-edge tools while contributing to infrastructure that investigates fundamental questions about identity, embodiment, and social interaction. The work is technically challenging and requires both engineering skill and creative problem-solving. I will provide relevant research literature, guidance on study design, VR headsets, and computing resources. There is also room to explore additional ideas and alternative approaches to specific components. Organizational Notes The project is offered as a 12 ECTS or 18 ECTS project with a workload distributed across the summer semester in two-week sprints. Presence at project meetings and the ability to allocate the required time for working on the project are mandatory requirements. We therefore do not recommend taking more than 30 ECTS in total alongside this project, and encourage students to carefully consider which other intensive courses they enroll in. |
