43 "I Felt a Litle Crazy Following a ‘Doll’": Investigating Real Influence of Virtual Influencers on Their Followers ABHINAV CHOUDHRY, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States JINDA HAN, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States XIAOYU XU, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States YUN HUANG, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States Mimic-Real Human Animated Human Non-human Fig. 1. An example of Virtual Influencers in the categories of Mimic-Real Human (@lilmiquela, @imma.gram, @alizarexx, @magazineluiza), Animated Human (@teflonsega, @yameiionline, @amiyamato, @anymalu_real ), and Non-human (@guggimon, @john.pork, @iamchillpill, @dayzeeandstaxx ). Virtual Infuencers (VIs) are computer-generated characters, many of which are often visually indistinguishable from humans and interact with the world in the frst-person perspective as social media infuencers. They are gaining popularity by creating content in various areas, including fashion, music, art, sports, games, environmental sustainability, and mental health. Marketing frms and brands increasingly use them to capitalise on their millions of followers. Yet, little is known about what prompts people to engage with these digital beings. In this paper, we present our interview study with online users who followed diferent VIs on Instagram Authors’ addresses: Abhinav Choudhry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois, United States, ac62@illinois.edu; Jinda Han, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois, United States, jhan51@illinois. edu; Xiaoyu Xu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois, United States, xiaoyux2@illinois.edu; Yun Huang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois, United States, yunhuang@illinois.edu. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. © 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. 2573-0142/2022/1-ART43 $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3492862 Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 6, No. GROUP, Article 43. Publication date: January 2022.