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Team Leads
Metaverse Team

The Metaverse Team aims to analyze interpersonal communication dynamics in social VR applications with a primary emphasis on avatar-mediated human communication.

Metaverse Team Members
Alumni
Metaverse Projects

The Metaverse Team is developing a critique and analysis of the Meta Quest Pro virtual reality (VR) headsets after conducting user experience (UX), avatar customization, and non-verbal communication research with facial and motion tracking.

The Metaverse UX project is focused on critiquing the usability and user experience (UX) of the Meta Quest Pro headsets, exploring topics of body dysmorphia, fashion, and design limitations, including lack of representation, gender conformity and identity, and physical comfort and satisfaction. The project also analyzes the social norms of user behavior, specifically critiquing how the Metaverse fails to acknowledge the organic way individuals adopt and interact with certain platforms and online communities based on existing brand identities.

The Avatar Representation Plug-In is working on the development of an avatar customization game using Readyplayer.me and Unity. The game development is inspired by the lack of body representation options present in current avatar customization sites, such as Readyplayer.me.

In collaboration with the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Team, this project is working on using computer vision to analyze body motion and non-verbal communication in a VR environment. The project is using existing algorithms to analyze eye gaze estimation, pose estimation, and nonverbal synchrony, or the synchrony of movements between two individuals during a conversation, using video data from the experiments with the Meta Quest Pro headsets in Meta Horizon Worlds.