Designing Humanoid Avatars in Individualised Virtual Reality for Mental Health Applications

In both training and therapeutic Virtual Reality applications, avatars are commonly used to interact with participants. However, this literature reveals considerable heterogeneity in the quality of these Avatars owing to technological changes with respect to computer graphics and hardware. The VR community may assume that with the development of higher quality, and therefore ever more lifelike avatars, then this implies better avatar performance, which then yields superior human-avatar interactions. But is that true? There is some suggestive evidence that ‘lifelike’ high-quality avatars hinder VR therapeutic outcomes. It could, therefore, be possible that lesser-quality humanoid avatars are an affordable substitute with better interaction.