Hide and seek: Choices of virtual backgrounds in video chats and their effects on perception

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DOI

In two studies, we investigate how users choose virtual backgrounds and how these backgrounds influence viewers’ impressions. First, we developed a web prototype allowing users to apply different virtual backgrounds to their camera views. We then asked users to select backgrounds that they believed would change viewers’ perceptions of their personality traits. We applied a subset of the virtual backgrounds participants selected to a subset of videos from the First Impression Dataset. We then ran an online study on Amazon MTurk to compare participants’ personality trait ratings for subjects in three conditions: with the selected virtual backgrounds, with a gray screen instead of a background, and with the original video backgrounds. The selected virtual backgrounds did not change the personality trait ratings in the intended direction. Instead, virtual background use of any kind results in a consistent “muting effect” that mitigates very high or low ratings compared to the original background.