Effects of Optical See-Through Displays on Self-Avatar Appearance in Augmented Reality

Display technologies in the fields of virtual and augmented reality affect the appearance of human representations, such as avatars used in telepresence or entertainment applications, based on the user's current viewing conditions. With changing viewing conditions, it is possible that the perceived appearance of one's avatar changes in an unexpected or undesired manner, which may change user behavior towards these avatars and cause frustration in using the AR display. In this paper, we describe a user study (N=20) where participants saw themselves in a mirror standing next to their own avatar through use of a HoloLens 2 optical see-through head-mounted display. Participants were tasked to match their avatar's appearance to their own under two environment lighting conditions (200 lux and 2,000 lux). Our results showed that the intensity of environment lighting had a significant effect on participants selected skin colors for their avatars, where participants with dark skin colors tended to make their avatar's skin color lighter, nearly to the level of participants with light skin color. Further, in particular female participants made their avatar's hair color darker for the lighter environment lighting condition. We discuss our results with a view on technological limitations and effects on the diversity of avatar representations on optical see-through displays.