Body, Avatar, and Me

Abstract

Self-presentation in online digital social spaces has been a long standing research interest in HCI and CSCW. As online social spaces evolve towards more embodied digital representations, it is important to understand how users construct and experience their self and interact with others' self in new and more complicated ways, as it may introduce new opportunities and unseen social consequences. Using findings of an interview study (N=30), in this paper we report an in-depth empirical investigation of the presentation and perception of self in Social Virtual Reality (VR) - 3D virtual spaces where multiple users can interact with one another through VR head-mounted displays and full-body tracked avatars. This study contributes to the growing body of CSCW literature on social VR by offering empirical evidence of how social VR platforms afford new phenomena and approaches of novel identity practices and by providing potential design implications to further support such practices. We also expand the existing research agenda in CSCW on the increasing complexity of people's self-presentation in emerging novel sociotechnical systems.