Thèmes de recherche
Titre de la thèse : A comparison of the effects of avatar and context between immersive and non-immersive virtual environments on individual and collective creativity —— Presence and Embodiment as Mediators
Résumé : As one of the essential skills for the 21st century, creativity influences people’s work and daily life, and people enhance creativity in classrooms and workplaces in various ways to achieve better goals. As VR systems become more user-friendly and affordable, researchers in the domain of creativity use them as creativity-boosting tools. Many experimental results have shown the effectiveness of both non-immersive (e.g. desktop) and immersive (e.g. VR headset) virtual environments in enhancing creative performance compared to reality. However, only a few studies compared the effect of two types of virtual environments (i.e. non-immersive and immersive) in terms of their creativity-boosting effects. This thesis aims to fill this gap by studying the difference between non-immersive and immersive virtual environments in terms of creativity enhancement at individual and collective levels. More specifically, I focus on comparing the effects of two digital representations, user-representation (i.e. avatar) and contextual representation in two virtual environments on creativity enhancement. In addition, I consider embodiment and presence, two psychological factors that are influenced by the level of immersion, to have mediation effects in the relationship between avatar, context, and creativity enhancement. I will conduct a series of lab experiments with single participants (individual level) or participants in groups (collective level), and observe the change in perceptions, emotions, behaviors, physiological activities, and creative performances of the participants in different kinds of virtual environments. With the empirical results, I will build a theoretical framework to describe the relationship between avatar, context, immersion, embodiment, presence, and creativity (the creative process and the creative performance) in virtual environments.