Evaluating the Effect of Clothing and Environment on the perceived Personality of Virtual Avatars

Virtual avatars gain more and more importance in our everyday lives, especially in the field of human machine interaction and affective interfaces. The avatar can be used as a virtual surrogate to answer questions in online costumer support applications, they can virtually tutor students in e-learning scenarios, or they can mimic a real person's behavior in specific situations for training purposes in for example medical consulting sessions or accidents. It is easy to imagine that, just as with real people, appropriate clothing style and environment might be very important to sustain the intended reality and maintain reliability, believability, and seriousness of the virtual avatar. As clothing style is known to convey personal attributes of another person like sociability, orderliness, or openness it is highly recommended to carefully adjust the avatar's clothes to its usage, purpose, and intended goal. It is also known that environment influences how we feel; we can feel relaxed in calm and quite surroundings (like at home or in the nature) or stressed in loud and noisy settings (like a train station or an airport). While designing a human-machine-interface the environment can also have an effect on our own feelings and thereby influence how we perceive a virtual avatar. This paper would like to investigate the role of clothing and environment on the perception of a virtual character. With the help of two experiments a virtual character's perceived personality is measured using personality traits based on the OCEAN dimensions in several different clothing styles and different environments.