Avatars that alter our appearance can potentially alter the way we feel about ourselves in VR space.

In one study, researchers gave people the change to practice self-therapy in the VR space.



Given an avatar that resembled themselves closely, the characters would explain their problem to a second avatar, after which they would undergo a perspective switch and "embody" the second avatar as it gave the answer to the question they asked. When the avatar giving the answer looked like a traditional representation of Sigmund Freud, the therapy worked far better than when the answering avatar was another VR copy of the subject, suggesting that in VR space our identities are surprisingly malleable.

That's pretty amazing because I think two scenarios should be in the future if this type of therapies raise, in one hand no matter how the Dr. looks in real life, in the VR treatment he/she will looks as better it should be for the type of treatment the patient might need. The second scenario I think about is where we as patients or even Drs won't care about the looks because somehow we recognize other stimulus instead of the images due evolution.

"We need to think about the fact that the external appearance of avatars can actually change the brain mechanisms involved and, ultimately, affect human behaviour."

"As technology advances, we develop our avatars to have deeper non-verbal communication."

Here the link to the Article: Virtual Reality Makes Avatars More Important Than Ever | Motherboard

That makes sense, from a purely psychological perspective. We are highly able to recognize cues for status and authority. As a result, we lend much more credence to someone who sends out signals of authority than we do someone who looks like us.

Not quite sure it's "identity" being malleable, but I didn't follow the source to see if they went into more detail on how they arrived at that conclusion.

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I never even considered this as a useful aspect. I imagine if one were to explore the Role Playing community in gaming you would see a lot more examples of this sort of thing. VR will allow this expwerience to become more immersive and less detached I think.

Really interesting to think about how your appearance in VR affects your confidence.

It's kinda like when you go out in public looking all dressed up VS going out after rolling out of bed. ;)

There was a study done quite some time ago that showed that people with more attractive avatars tended to be more outgoing. The weird part was that this confidence lasted beyond the online session. Nick Yee has done a bunch of research on this.There's a great article called "The Psychology of Video Game Avatars" that covers a bunch of Yee's findings.

See, I'm a real overweight guy and know the avatars are never really going to look like me. For the Oculus Avatar I just hit the randomizer until I saw something neat. Wonder what that says about me...

I always try to put myself for my avatars or at least something that looks like me, maybe I have a lot of ego :P

Originally Posted by Russell Holly

See, I'm a real overweight guy and know the avatars are never really going to look like me. For the Oculus Avatar I just hit the randomizer until I saw something neat. Wonder what that says about me...

I remember someone I used to play Second Life with that did the opposite of what most people did. Instead of selecting the most attractive look she could, she deliberately tried to make her avatar look like her weight and general look.

In a world full of, well, supermodels, she really stood out. Takes a lot of confidence to do that.

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Even if she did it as an act against the system because she was drunk or something, it's nice someone not caring about what people say, but I always give a chance to all the options.

Originally Posted by Chemy JMHT

I always try to put myself for my avatars or at least something that looks like me, maybe I have a lot of ego :P

Yeah I tend to do that in my MMORPG's because that is part of my role playing bit. This includes the gender aspect I try and play as I think my characters would. It would be interesting to do it from a very first person perspective.

My brain has been so conditioned to respond to visual cues I could probably spend the rest of my life trying to undo it and not get there.