Since 2021, academia and industry have witnessed rapid advancements in virtual digital human (VDH) driven by the increasing development of the metaverse. Given the rich achievements on this topic, the current study is aimed at analyzing the research status and probing the research trends using the bibliometric method. A total of 460 journal papers on VDH were collected from the Web of Science Core Collection. The current hot topics in VDH research and main research power were analyzed and visualized using bibliometric software. The keyword co-occurrence and cluster analyses highlight prominent research hotspots and trends in VDH studies. Despite the diverse applications of VDHs, several challenges remain, including issues related to social acceptance and the uncanny valley effect. In summary, the research findings provide implications for the policymakers, industry stakeholders, and the public to understand the current hotspot and trends of VDH.

Following the development of mobile internet and smart devices, designing smart product interfaces is positively significant to enhance user experience and improving the quality of life. Users automatically produce implicit evaluations when they encounter or use the interfaces of smart devices. However, what happens in our brain after receiving the visual information? How do we process visual information? How do the interface design features affect the subconscious evaluation process? To answer these questions, the current study aims to investigate the neural mechanism of users’ subconscious evaluation process of mobile interfaces in smart apps by using event-related potentials (ERPs) technology. ERPs results showed that P1, N1, and N2 can reflect participants’ subconscious evaluation of mobile interfaces in smart apps. In conclusion, participants could evaluate the more obvious layout feature but ignore the less obvious color feature of mobile news app interfaces automatically. Moreover, both the right-hemisphere and valence hypotheses were observed in the current study. These findings enrich the design of mobile interfaces and user cognition theory. Besides, the present study established a feasible technological method for the acquisition of users’ implicit needs and provides a data foundation for smart service. In addition, it can help app designers to identify users’ implicit needs and compare the alternative prototype in the development stage of mobile interfaces.

Short-form videos are popular worldwide as a thriving form of entertainment. Its fragmentation pattern, which presents users with intensive and engaging information, might lead to addiction and adverse effects. This study aims to investigate the effect of addiction to short-form videos on users’ attention, including attention while watching videos and the ability of attentional concentration after watching time. Users addicted or non-addicted to short-form videos were screened to participate in a short-form video watching task and a Stroop task based on eye-tracking technology. The results showed that addicted users reported less interest, centration, and more distractions and exhibited more fixation counts and shorter average fixation duration during watching short-form videos than non-addicted users. In the Stroop task, addicted users achieved longer response time and less accuracy and showed longer average fixation duration, more fixation counts, and saccades between the targets and the distractors than non-addicted users. The results suggest that addicted users might suffer more difficulties maintaining attention, have more attention deficits while watching short-form videos, and have impaired attentional concentration for processing interference. The findings contribute to understanding the effect of addiction to short-form videos and provide helpful insight into using it healthily and preventing addiction.

The increasing growth in the use of mobile news apps has raised questions on how their interface design features affect users’ gaze behaviours and behavioural performance. To tackle these issues, two experiments (visual browse and search tasks) were designed to investigate the impact of interface design features (colour and layout) on users’ gaze behaviours (fixation count, fixation time ratio and first fixation duration) and behavioural performance (task completion time and search accuracy) with a portable eye tracker. Twenty-four participants were recruited to browse and search for news in different mobile news interfaces with Chinese language. The results showed that mobile news apps with white interfaces attracted more attention and participants needed more time to comprehend the information of white interfaces in the visual browse task. Furthermore, participants achieved higher search efficiency in the visual search task by using interfaces with red keyword and LT-RP (Left Text-Right Picture). In addition, it is noticeable that participants paid more attention to the text than the pictures of mobile news interfaces, and most participants first looked at text and later observed pictures. The findings provide valuable and interesting insights for better understanding users’ gaze behaviours and behavioural performance of mobile news apps.

In an era of mobile Internet, the using of mobile interfaces is ineluctable in our daily life. To some extent, the first impression of the mobile user interfaces determines users’ downloading and using behavior, even affects the overall user experience. In fact, the underlying neural mechanism of users’ first impression formation of mobile user interface is worthy to be investigated. Considering the process of first impression formation is always unconscious and transient, event-related potentials (ERPs), which are used to track users’ cerebral activities could be an appropriate method to explore this process. In the present study, the perceived usability and esthetics are taken as the evaluation dimensions of user’ first impression formation, and ERPs were used to investigate which dimensions were automatically activated when users browsed the mobile user interfaces passively without any explicit guidance. The ERPs results showed that N2 was dominated by perceived usability and esthetics, which reflected in enhanced N2 for high esthetics than for low esthetics, and larger N2 for high-perceived usability/high esthetics compared to low-perceived usability/low esthetics. Moreover, there was a larger late positive potential (LPP) for low esthetics interfaces with respect to high esthetics ones. The findings revealed that users could make an implicit evaluation spontaneously to the mobile user interfaces with different levels of perceived usability and esthetics. Furthermore, users’ first impression is significantly affected by the differences in esthetics but marginally influenced by the difference in perceived usability. The suggestions from this study for mobile application designers might be that the esthetics design of the mobile user interface should be prioritized in the early design stage.