Perception of Characters in VR: How a character’s height affects the perception of that character

Sammanfattning: Virtual reality (VR) is gaining more interest as the technology develops. Today’s Head Mounted Displays enables the users to control the virtual environment (VE) by moving in the physical space. This interaction method usually means that users have their own height in the VE. This is of interest since previous studies show that height affects how we perceive other people. Firstly, a tall person is perceived as being stronger, more dominant and more intelligent than a short person. Secondly, a shorter female is perceived as more socially concerned than a taller female. The aim of this study was to investigate whether these traits connected to height still apply in VR. The result indicates that perception of dominance and strength still apply in VR whereas perception of intelligence and social concern does not. Meaning that a stronger, or more dominant, character can be achieved simply by making that character taller, and vice versa. Consequently, producers of VR content have a clearer task at hand when creating content - they can alter the height of the character when portraying a character as either strong or weak, and either dominant or submissive.