News: Anthropomorphs and online communities

In recent years, MIT has conducted research on how people interact online. One study, Anthropomorphic Visualization: Depicting Participants in Online Spaces Using the Human Form, by Ethan Lewis Perry, explores how "anthropomorphs" -- compact humanoid forms -- affect online communicatation. Using human social theory and Java, Perry built a community of rudimentary anthropomorphs and designed a study to evaluate the effectiveness of anthropomorphic visualizations in terms of aiding online communications and building online communities.

The study has several purposes: to apply studies of real human societies and human psychology to online human communities, to discern trends in the use of online personas, and to determine what are the most effective ways of incorporating anthropomorphs into online communities.

- The type of data that is used to generate the Anthropomorphs may be more or less
relevant to particular groups or populations of online users.
- Certain visual styles of Anthropomorphs are more appealing and acceptable to some
users than others.
- Additional features of the Anthropomorphs could make them more effective at providing certain types of information.
- It is unclear to what extent the visualizations impact users’ social perceptions. Users have some concerns about the negative effects that Anthropomorphs will have upon others’ perceptions of the individuals in their group.
- The Anthropomorphs have been informally shown to be useful for retrieving particular types of information about the participants in an online group.

While Perry's digital personas are 2D, some of his findings could be extended to 3D avatars, as the following excerpt illustrates:

"Having an Anthropomorph change appearance quickly through animation could be useful for communicating how the person’s behavior changed over time. It also might be appropriate to make certain elements in an Anthropomorph’s body move to communicate other types of information. For instance, an Anthropomorph might move its eyes in the direction of another Anthropomorph to indicate who the author pays most attention to.

"Another visual issue to address further is the role of the face. The presence of the face seems to make the visualization more engaging, but it is problematic if it is communicating information about emotional tone that is inaccurate. Having the face represent emotional tone information that is more specifically related to particular sections of messages may be more appropriate. In addition, research into generating more detailed and subtle facial expressions should be applied to see whether more precise facial expressions provide a more accurate sense of author tone."