# Behavioural Realism and Its Impact on Virtual Reality Social Interactions Involving Self-Disclosure
## 4 Discussion
### The Effect of Avatar Behavioural Realism on Enjoyment, Realism, and Perceived Eye Contact  
The primary aim of this study was to investigate whether an avatar controlled by full-body motion capture technology, with a higher level of behavioural realism, would be perceived as more realistic than an avatar with limited motion tracking. The results confirmed the first hypothesis because the avatar with higher behavioural realism was rated as more realistic compared to the avatar with less behavioural realism. This study highlights the potential of motion capture technology for creating realistic avatars that can enhance VR social interactions by making the experience more lifelike. Previous studies have suggested that including higher levels of behavioural realism for avatars during VR social interactions can improve enjoyment by making the interaction more lifelike [22, 26, 29, 30, 31, 37, 79]. These studies informed the second hypothesis of this study, where it was predicted that an avatar with higher levels of behavioural realism would be more enjoyable to interact with. The results show that participants rated the iClone UNREAL avatar with higher behavioural realism as more enjoyable to interact with than the Vive Sync avatar with lower behavioural realism, thus supporting the second hypothesis. A moderate correlation was found between the participants' ratings of enjoyment and perceived realism, indicating that those who rated the avatar as more realistic also rated them as more enjoyable to interact with. These results suggest that better motion capture can help improve VR social interactions by providing avatars with lifelike behaviour that is more enjoyable for users. This study also investigated whether the behavioural realism of an avatar's facial gestures could affect perceived eye contact duration during a VR social interaction involving self-disclosure. The final hypothesis of this study proposed that an avatar with a higher level of behavioural realism, achieved through detailed facial gestures via motion capture, would be perceived as maintaining more eye contact than an avatar with lower behavioural realism [2, 22, 41, 43, 44, 46]. The results show that the iCone UNREAL avatar, which had full facial movement tracking, was rated higher for perceived eye contact duration than the Vive Sync avatar. As described in the methods, the Vive Sync avatar had lower fidelity eye-tracking capabilities due to the limitations of the Vive Focus 3 onboard eye-tracking system. Specifically, its eye-tracking system, though capable of tracking eye gaze and movement direction at a frequency of 120 Hz, was less accurate than the full facial motion tracking of the iClone UNREAL that used a TrueDepth camera. This study demonstrated that full facial motion tracking of avatars is more effective in promoting perceived eye contact than the specific eye-tracking technology of some VR headsets. The differencesin eye tracking may have affected the appearance of nonverbal communication through less eye contact [5; 29; 41; 43; 44; 45]. However, the Vive Sync avatar was, on average, enjoyed \"quite a bit\", thus supporting our conclusions on the potential benefits of both VR avatars for therapy. The secondary aim of this study was to address limitations in both [PERSON] et al. [23] and [PERSON] et al. [22]) where only the participants disclosed their experiences. Therefore, this study implemented a reciprocal social interaction between participant and interview. It was expected that disclosures from the avatar would result in higher realism ratings, as participants' attention would be more focused on it. However, while the results showed that disclosures from the interviewer did lead to higher perceived realism ratings, its effect size was only small. This suggests that although attention towards the avatar may help to improve how realistic it appears, the magnitude of this effect is unlikely to be as impactful as the avatar's appearance or behaviour.