This research focuses on the use of feminized virtual avatars (FVAs) in the fashion industry and explores the risk of using FVAs for the appropriation and exploitation of marginalized communities and identities. Through a critical visual analysis of the virtual avatars Shudu Gram and Miquela Sousa, this study analyzes how they are made to represent gendered and racialized women’s bodies. The research aims to understand how the representations of FVAs reflect and influence power dynamics and social inequalities. This thesis found that the representations of Shudu and Miquela reflect and reinforce racial stereotypes, perpetuate gender inequalities, and uphold unrealistic beauty standards. Moreover, their representations of a Black woman and a Latina reinforce the exotification and Othering of Black women and Latinas, reducing their identities to a commodified aesthetic. Furthermore, the sexualized representations of Shudu and Miquela reinforce gender stereotypes and power imbalances. Finally, the lack of agency and autonomy in FVAs further complicates objectifying and exotifying portrayals. This research's theoretical and practical implications emphasize the need for critical analysis, ethical considerations, and inclusive practices in using FVAs. The study highlights the importance of critically analyzing FVAs and their implications within the context of gendered colonial legacies and structural inequalities.

This thesis is aimed at investigating virtual embodiment and how it can affect a performer's experience of; and relationship to the physical body. With this auto ethnographic case study I hope to shed some light on the  ways virtual reality technology enables critical experiences and what effects these experiences could have, through my own personal journey. The study was conducted in the setting of  my home using a Pico 4 VR head mounted display and HTC vive full body tracking. The project used for the case study was an audiovisual pole dance performance that was performed on the platform Neos VR and streamed to Studio 44 in Stockholm. The research is rooted in the artistic field but draws knowledge from psychological and social research on VR as a cognitive and embodied technology. The research methods used to gather and analyse the research material were visual research, phenomenology and deep listening. The data collection consisted of visual and text based data. On the visual data I applied thematic analysis, coding and categorising of the text based data and analysing hyper reflections with a phenomenological approach. I found that the experience of virtual embodiment did change my relationship to my own body in a positive way by feeling more grounded and accepting. I was less anxious about performing and felt more confident in myself. Because of the entanglement of the study it was not possible to solely contribute the outcomes of the effect to virtual avatar embodiment in itself. It did however demonstrate how these VR technologies could be used to enable norm critical experiences by the use of norm critical design applied to avatars challenging beauty ideals and societal norms of performativity. My virtual embodiment and its effects on me can give a unique insight that would benefit developers and users active in these platforms as well as for personal introspection and self development. The study serves as a good base to build future research on and I intend to further elaborate on the extensive research data that was gathered.

This thesis worked towards answering the following question: Where, if at all, do the beliefs and behaviors associated with interacting with a nonhuman agent deviate from how we treat a human? This was done by exploring the inter-related fields of Human-Computer and Human-Robot Interaction in the literature review, viewing them through the theoretical lens of anthropomorphism. A study was performed which looked at how 104 participants would attribute blame in a robotic surgery scenario, as detailed in a vignette. A majority of results were statistically non-significant, however, some results emerged which may imply a diffusion of responsibility in human-robot collaboration scenarios.

The importance of looking at student and teacher interactions holistically is essential and results in reflective teaching practices; consequently, the reflective practice of teaching needs to incorporate all facets of the teacher, known and unknown. This study looks at the potential influence of hidden biases towards adolescent Hispanic males and students with Emotional Behavior Disorders by observing preservice teacher (PT) interactions with students within a simulated classroom environment. Factorial MANOVAs and Discriminant analyses revealed statistically significant interactions and relationships between participant level of bias and the identified student avatars. These exchanges were more prevalent with one student avatar by both experimental and control PTs; indicating that student characteristics and their differences are important factors that need to be considered when addressing issues related to bias.

This project responds to a problem in scholarship describing the relationship between virtual avatars and their physical users. In Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle identifies points of slippage wherein the persona of the avatar becomes conflated with the user‘s sense of self to create an authentic self predicated on both real and virtual experiences (Turkle 184-5). Although the conflation of the authentic self with the virtual has provided various affordances for serious games or other pedagogical projects such as classrooms hosted through the game Second Life, the processes enabling identification with an avatar have been largely overlooked. This project examines several layers of influence that affect how users play with identity to create successful social performances within an online community connected to a work of fiction. In doing so, the user must consider his or her own motivations for creating a persona, how these motivations will allow the avatar to achieve social acceptance, and how these social performances connect to the scene created by the work of fiction. Using an online role-playing forum based on a work of fiction as a site of analysis, this project will borrow from game studies, dramatism, and identity theory to create a framework for discussing processes through which users identify with their virtual avatars.

No / The very word "digital" has acquired a status that far exceeds its humble dictionary definition. Even the prefix digital, when associ­ ated with familiar sectors such as radio, television, photography and telecommunications, has reinvented these industries, and provided a unique opportunity to refresh them with new start-up companies, equipment, personnel, training and working practices - all of which are vital to modern national and international economies. The last century was a period in which new media stimulated new job opportunities, and in many cases created totally new sectors: video competed with film, CDs transformed LPs, and computer graphics threatened traditional graphic design sectors. Today, even the need for a physical medium is in question. The virtual digital domain allows the capture, processing, transmission, storage, retrieval and display of text, images, audio and animation without familiar materials such as paper, celluloid, magnetic tape and plastic. But moving from these media to the digital domain intro­ duces all sorts of problems, such as the conversion of analog archives, multimedia databases, content-based retrieval and the design of new content that exploits the benefits offered by digital systems. It is this issue of digital content creation that we address in this book. Authors from around the world were invited to comment on different aspects of digital content creation, and their contributions form the 23 chapters of this volume.

The use of realistic 3D avatars in Virtual Reality (VR) has gained significant traction in applications such as telecommunication and gaming, offering immersive experiences and face-to-face interactions. However, standalone VR devices often face limitations in computational resources and real-time rendering requirements, necessitating the optimization of 3D models through mesh simplification to enhance performance and ensure a smooth user experience. This thesis presents a pipeline that utilizes a Convolutional Neural Network to reconstruct realistic 3D human facial models in a static form from single RGB head images. The reconstructed models are then subjected to the Quadric Error Metrics simplification algorithm, enabling different levels of simplification to be achieved. An evaluation was conducted, utilizing 30 photos from the NoW dataset, to examine the trade-offs associated with employing mesh simplification on the generated facial models within the VR environment. The evaluation results demonstrate that reducing the polygon count improves frame rates and reduces GPU usage in VR, thereby enhancing overall performance. However, this improvement comes at the cost of increased simplification execution time and geometric errors, and decreased perceptual quality. This research contributes to the understanding of mesh simplification’s impact on human facial models within the VR context, providing insights into balancing model complexity and real-time rendering performance, particularly in resource-constrained environments such as mobile devices or cloud-based applications, as well as for models located farther away from the cameras. / Användningen av realistiska 3D-avatarer inom Virtuell Verklighet (VR) har fått betydande uppmärksamhet inom tillämpningar som telekommunikation och spel, vilket erbjuder en uppslukande upplevelse och ansikte mot ansikte-interaktioner. Dock möter fristående VR-enheter ofta begränsningar i beräkningsresurser och krav på realtidsrendering, vilket gör det nödvändigt att optimera 3D-modeller genom nätverksförenkling för att förbättra prestanda och säkerställa en smidig användarupplevelse. Denna avhandling presenterar en pipeline som använder sig av ett konvolutionellt neuralt nätverk för att rekonstruera realistiska 3D-modeller av mänskliga ansikten i en statisk form från enstaka RGB-bilder av huvudet. De rekonstruerade modellerna genomgår sedan nätverksförenkling med Quadric Error Metrics-algoritmen, vilket möjliggör olika nivåer av förenkling. En utvärdering genomfördes, med hjälp av 30 foton från NoW-datasetet, för att undersöka avvägningarna i samband med att använda nätverksförenkling på de genererade ansiktsmodellerna inom VR-miljön. Utvärderingsresultaten visar att minskning av polygonantal förbättrar bildhastigheten och minskar GPU-användningen inom VR, vilket förbättrar den övergripande prestandan. Dock sker denna förbättring på bekostnad av ökad tid för förenklingsexekvering och geometriska fel, samt minskad perceptuell kvalitet. Denna forskning bidrar till förståelsen av nätverksförenklingens påverkan på mänskliga ansiktsmodeller inom VR-sammanhanget och ger insikter om att balansera modellkomplexitet och realtidsrenderingsprestanda, särskilt i resursbegränsade miljöer som mobilenheter eller molnbaserade applikationer, samt för modeller som är längre bort från kamerorna.

This study explore how different forms of embodied experiences in virtual reality can be explained. Virtual reality (VR) is a quickly emerging, although understudied field that in the last decade have come to take a bigger and bigger part in everyone’s daily life. With the rise of virtual reality new possibilities for social platforms in VR have emerged, one of these is the virtual world of VRChat. This paper aims to give an introduction to the world of VRChat, through looking at how different embodied practises take place in it. It is based on a two-month long ethnographic fieldwork in the world of VRChat, following at a group of around 20 individuals scattered around the world and their experiences of embodiment in VRChat. This paper looks at how different forms of embodiment take place in VRChat and how these forms of embodiment affect different aspects of being in a virtual world. I study how mirrors and avatars through embodiment and interplay of different agencies create identity and a sense of ‘me’ amongst users in VRChat. I look at how embodiment connects to immersion and how it bridges the gap between reality and virtuality, through the translation of the sense touch in virtual reality to real life a. I see that a non-traditional form of immersion plays a big role in creating this phenomenon which is called phantom sense

No description available.

Previous research has found that users' interactions with others in online environments are often guided by the same rules and stereotypes we apply in our everyday lives. However, fewer studies have used virtual worlds as an experimental setting for the systematic examination of how avatar appearance and offline identity affect the outcome of users' actual interactions. This online field experiment measured the effect of avatar attractiveness, avatar gender, purported user gender, and favor size on the rate at which users received help across 2,300 separate user interactions. In addition, the main study's avatar gender, purported user gender, and favor size manipulations were replicated with a human avatar condition with 761 participants to examine whether trends for these factors' effects were similar with human avatars. In the main study, attractive avatars generally received more help than less attractive avatars. However, purported female users were helped less frequently than purported male users when represented by avatars that were either male or less attractive. Trends in the human avatar condition were similar to those observed in the main study. Implications for avatar-mediated communication and the persistence of sex roles in virtual environments are discussed. / Master of Arts