Assessing the Impact of Virtual Human's Appearance on Users' Trust Levels

Virtual humans are used to facilitate interactions in sensitive contexts such as healthcare. In such contexts, trust in the information source plays an important role in reception of the information. Prior work has shown that physical appearance affects trustworthiness in human-human interactions; therefore, we examined the effect of virtual human's appearance on users' trust. We ran a between-users study with 12 adult participants, who watched a video of a virtual human with professional attire (e.g., lab coat) or with general attire (e.g., button-down shirt). We examined the duration of eye fixation on the virtual human's face along with participants' self-reported trust levels. We found that there was no statistical difference in eye contact or trust between the two test conditions.