Investigating the Impact of Personalized Gaze Behaviors on Social Interaction with Virtual Humans in VR: A Study Design

In this paper, we present our research plan to investigate how personalized gaze behaviors of virtual humans affect user experience in Virtual Reality (VR). We describe a planned user study in which participants engage in dyadic conversations with an LLM-powered virtual human whose eye-contact behaviors are driven by a context-aware, evidence-based gaze model. The study employs a 3 × 2 mixed design, comparing three gaze-control conditions (general model, personalized model, and baseline) across two communication modes (synchronous and asynchronous). We plan to collect subjective, behavioral, and physiological data to examine the effects on social presence, trust, comfort, and perceived realism. Details of our study design and system are described.