peer reviewed · Frontiers in Virtual Reality (2026) · Jun 17, 2026
The influence of avatar generation and appearance on embodiment and user experience in virtual reality
Judith Hartfill, Frederico Bormann, Erik Wolf, Frank Steinicke
In plain English
Thirty participants embodied three full-body avatars at matched realism: a generic one, one they configured themselves, and one generated from a photo. Letting people build their own avatar produced higher attractiveness and emotional-valence ratings and a stronger reaction to a virtual threat, while the photo-generated avatar scored highest on self-similarity. Core embodiment measures — ownership, agency, presence — showed no reliable differences, which suggests that at this level of fidelity the act of choosing matters more to how an avatar feels than how closely it resembles the user.
Abstract
Consumer-grade virtual reality (VR) now allows embodying full-body avatars to act within the virtual world. Although the effect of avatar appearance on embodiment has been investigated in several studies, the role of user involvement in the creation process remains unclear. In this study, we compare a generic, a self-configured, and a photo-generated full-body avatar with similar realism levels in terms of embodiment and user experience. We conducted a study with 30 participants, which revealed higher ratings of attractiveness, valence, and threat reaction under the self-configured condition than those in the photo-generated avatar. However, direct measures for embodiment remained inconclusive. These results motivate further research in the field of self-configured avatars, considering the feedback about avatar diversity that is still worthy of improvement.
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