Trusting Strangers in Immersive Virtual Reality

Social interactions in immersive virtual reality (IVR) benefit from more realistic designed avatars whilst head mounted displays (HMD) are simultaneously offering virtual reality experiences with improving levels of immersion and presence. The combination of these developments creates a need to understand how users remit trust towards avatars in IVR. We evaluated trust towards two categories of avatars (robot vs. human-like) in VR by conducting a lab study (N=21) where participants had to play a trust game (TG) with each avatar. Our findings highlight that although the trust game revealed equal trust levels towards both categories of avatars, participants felt a significant sense of "togetherness" with the human-like avatar compared to the robot.