Capability at a Glance: Design Guidelines for Intuitive Avatars Communicating Augmented Actions in Virtual Reality
2026-03-06 • Human-Computer Interaction
Human-Computer Interaction
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied how virtual reality (VR) avatars can show users what special abilities they have and how to use them. They asked designers to create avatars that clearly communicate these abilities and made 16 guidelines based on the designs. They tested the guidelines by having people design avatars with and without them, finding that the guidelines helped make avatars easier to understand. Finally, the authors showed how the guidelines work in real VR apps.
Virtual RealityAvatar DesignAffordanceUser InteractionDesign GuidelinesUsabilityCapabilitiesHuman-Computer Interaction
Authors
Yang Lu, Tianyu Zhang, Jiamu Tang, Yanna Lin, Jiankun Yang, Longyu Zhang, Shijian Luo, Yukang Yan
Abstract
Virtual Reality (VR) enables users to engage with capabilities beyond human limitations, but it is not always obvious how to trigger these capabilities. Taking the lens of Affordance, we believe avatar design is the key to solving this issue, which ideally should communicate its capabilities and how to activate them. To understand the current practice, we selected eight capabilities across four categories and invited twelve professional designers to design avatars that communicate the capabilities and their corresponding interactions. From the resulting designs, we formed 16 guidelines to provide general and category-specific recommendations. Then, we validated these guidelines by letting two groups of twelve participants design avatars with and without guidelines. Participants rated the guidelines' clarity and usefulness highly. External judges confirmed that avatars designed with the guidelines were more intuitive in conveying the capabilities and interaction methods. Finally, we demonstrated the applicability of the guidelines in avatar design for four VR applications.