| Beschreibung |
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. The technical core of this project involves developing a functional VR conversation environment where two or more participants can interact through avatars while experiencing real-time voice transformation. Participants will be randomly assigned to either embody avatars matching their own gender presentation or avatars presenting a different gender. The voice transformation technology, provided through a collaboration with DFKI (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence), will alter participants' voices to sound natural and gender-congruent with their assigned avatars, making the transformed voice indistinguishable from natural speech. This creates a comprehensive embodiment experience where both visual and auditory identity markers are consistently aligned. The primary challenge and focus of this semester project is building the technical infrastructure that makes such research possible. Students will develop a realistic VR environment suitable for natural conversations—perhaps an office meeting room, a casual café setting, or a professional interview space. The avatars need to be expressive and believable, with facial animations, lip-sync, and body language that respond naturally to speech and movement. The audio pipeline must handle voice capture, route it through the transformation model, and deliver it to other participants with minimal latency to maintain natural conversation flow. Synchronizing the transformed voice with avatar animations, ensuring smooth multiplayer networking, and creating an intuitive user experience all represent substantial technical challenges that form the heart of this project. Beyond the technical implementation, students will also engage with the research process itself. This includes designing the study protocol with appropriate control and experimental conditions, developing conversation scenarios that elicit meaningful interactions, creating measurement instruments to capture behavioral and emotional responses, and planning data collection procedures. The stretch goal is to conduct a pilot study that not only validates the technical system but potentially contributes to actual research on embodied interaction and gender perception in virtual environments. This project offers students the opportunity to work at the intersection of advanced VR technology, real-time audio processing, and social psychology research. The system you develop will serve as infrastructure for investigating fundamental questions about identity, embodiment, and social interaction. You'll gain hands-on experience with cutting-edge technologies while contributing to research that could deepen our understanding of how virtual embodiment influences human behavior. The work is challenging but rewarding, requiring both technical skill and creative problem-solving. I will provide relevant research literature, guidance on study design and implementation, VR headsets, and computing resources as needed. If students bring additional ideas for features or alternative approaches to specific components, there is room to explore and experiment. Project is offered as 12 ECTs or 18 ECTs project with respective amount of workload. The workload is scheduled in two-week sprints and distributed through the whole semester with accommodation for a Christmas break. Presence at the project meeting and ability to allocate required time for working on the project is mandatory requirement (therefore, we do not recommend doing more than 30 ECTS altogether and to carefully consider which other intensive courses to take alongside). |
| Voraussetzungen |
Students from HCI Masters and CS4DM: We are looking for students with previous experience developing VR environments in Unity or Unreal Engine. General interest in user-centered software development and interaction design is essential, as the project requires careful attention to user experience and creating believable, immersive interactions. We expect willingness to work collaboratively in a team and solve complex technical challenges that span multiple domains—3D graphics, audio processing, networking, and user interface design. Experience with audio processing, multiplayer VR systems, or animation pipelines would be beneficial but is not required. Most importantly, we need students who can commit the necessary time to work on the project consistently throughout the semester until end of March, as developing a functional research system requires sustained effort and iterative refinement. To avoid issues after the project selection algorithm, we require interested students to write an email to robert.spang@uni-weimar.de to confirm eligibility for participation in the project. If you have not emailed us and do not qualify after the algorithm distribution, you would be automatically unenrolled from this project. Please apply by email to robert.spang@uni-weimar.de (please include a motivation statement, mention which relevant courses you have taken, and provide a description of your prior experience with VR development, game engines, or related areas, with examples of prior work if applicable). |
