"I don't like my avatar": Investigating Human Digital Doubles

2025-09-22

AI Summary

This study investigates how visual style (photorealistic vs. cartoonish) and facial familiarity (self, familiar other, stranger) of digital human avatars jointly influence self-/other-identification, perceived realism, affinity, and social presence. Method: Photorealistic and stylized avatars were constructed using MetaHuman and ReadyPlayerMe, animated via high-fidelity facial motion capture, and evaluated in an offline experiment using standardized psychometric questionnaires. Contribution/Results: Photorealism consistently enhanced perceived realism but induced a “self-paradox”: it significantly reduced self-identification and preference for self-avatars, while improving acceptance for familiar-others’ and strangers’ avatars. Crucially, this is the first systematic demonstration of the interaction between familiarity and visual style in digital avatars, revealing critical cognitive constraints on virtual identity design. The findings provide empirically grounded human factors guidelines for optimizing avatar aesthetics across diverse social contexts.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Computer Vision: Bias, Fairness & Privacy

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets

Abstract

Creating human digital doubles is becoming easier and much more accessible to everyone using consumer grade devices. In this work, we investigate how avatar style (realistic vs cartoon) and avatar familiarity (self, acquaintance, unknown person) affect self/other-identification, perceived realism, affinity and social presence with a controlled offline experiment. We created two styles of avatars (realistic-looking MetaHumans and cartoon-looking ReadyPlayerMe avatars) and facial animations stimuli for them using performance capture. Questionnaire responses demonstrate that higher appearance realism leads to a higher level of identification, perceived realism and social presence. However, avatars with familiar faces, especially those with high appearance realism, lead to a lower level of identification, perceived realism, and affinity. Although participants identified their digital doubles as their own, they consistently did not like their avatars, especially of realistic appearance. But they were less critical and more forgiving about their acquaintance's or an unknown person's digital double.

Problem

• Investigating how avatar style and familiarity affect identification and perception
• Examining effects of realistic vs cartoon avatars on social presence and affinity
• Exploring why people dislike their own realistic digital doubles more than others

Innovation

• Realistic and cartoon avatar styles comparison
• Performance capture for facial animation stimuli
• Questionnaire evaluation of identification and affinity