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The perception and experience of avatars has been critical to understand the social dynamics in virtual environments, online gaming, and collaborative systems. How would emerging sociotechnical systems further complicate the role of avatars in our online social lives? In this paper we focus on how people perceive and understand their avatars in social virtual reality (VR) - 3D virtual spaces where multiple users can interact with one another through VR head-mounted displays (HMDs). Based on 30 interviews, we identified three key themes emerging in people's perceptions and experiences of their avatars across various social VR applications. Our study contributes to further improving social VR technologies and better understanding emerging social interaction dynamics and consequences within social VR.
Freeman et al. (Sat,) studied this question.