It may soon be possible to detect if someone is lying online with the help of avatars that can mimic our real-world eye movements.
In a research on virtual worlds, which are populated by avatars with static or pre-programmed gazes, scientists at the University College London found that when they mirrored some person’s eye movement on their avatars it was very easy to spot when they were lying.
Virtual world is a genre of online community that often takes the form of a computer-based simulated environment, through which users can interact with one another and use and create objects.
The term today has become synonymous with interactive 3D virtual environments, where the users take the form of avatars visible to others graphically but these avatars have static or pre-programmed gazes.
“One way to make interactions feel more realistic is to reproduce a person’s eye movement on their avatar. It will also make it easier to spot whether an avatar is telling the truth,” lead author William Steptoe was quoted as saying by New Scientist.
The technology could help in business meetings held in virtual environments, or to enhance communication between people with social phobias, where face-to-face interaction can seem daunting, Steptoe said.
Ralph Schroeder of the University of Oxford says the work is “a big step forward” in virtual communication. This work is “unique in showing that if you give an avatar eyes that blink and move, people will treat them in a highly real way”, he says.
During the research, 11 volunteers were asked personal questions, such as to name their favourite book and told them to lie in some of their answers. The participants wore eye-tracking glasses that recorded their blink rate, direction and length of gaze and pupil dilation.
A second group of 27 people then watched a selection of clips of avatars as they delivered the first group’s answers.
Some avatars had eye movements that mirrored those of the original volunteers, while others had no eye movement at all.
When the volunteers were asked whether they believed the avatars were being truthful or lying, on average, they were able to identify 88 per cent of truths correctly when the avatars had eye movement.
Enhancing expressive features such as eye movement could eventually make avatar-mediated communication feel more trustworthy than online video, because only relevant visual cues need to be displayed, Steptoe said.
