Abstract
Virtual Reality can be used to embody people in different types of body—so that when they look towards themselves or in a mirror they will see a life-sized virtual body instead of their own, and that moves with their own movements. This will typically give rise to the illusion of body ownership over the virtual body. Previous research has focused on embodiment in humanoid bodies, albeit with various distortions such as an extra limb or asymmetry, or with a body of a different race or gender. Here we show that body ownership also occurs over a virtual body that looks like a cartoon rabbit, at the same level as embodiment as a human. Furthermore, we explore the impact of embodiment on performance as a public speaker in front of a small audience. Forty five participants were recruited who had public speaking anxiety. They were randomly partitioned into three groups of 15, embodied as a Human, as the Cartoon rabbit, or from third person perspective (3PP) with respect to the rabbit. In each condition they gave two talks to a small audience of the same type as their virtual body. Several days later, as a test condition, they returned to give a talk to an audience of human characters embodied as a human. Overall, anxiety reduced the most in the Human condition, the least in the Cartoon condition, and there was no change in the 3PP condition, taking into account existing levels of trait anxiety. We show that embodiment in a cartoon character leads to high levels of body ownership from the first person perspective and synchronous real and virtual body movements. We also show that the embodiment influences outcomes on the public speaking task.
Highlights
When you put on a head-tracked stereo head-mounted display and you look down towards yourself, if it has been so programmed you will see a life-sized virtual body substituting your real unseen body
Our two questions were 1) whether the level of body ownership would differ between the three conditions and 2) whether embodiment as the cartoon character would lead to less anxiety for the public speaking in front of humans at the second visit
The first is that the level of body ownership did not differ between embodiment in a cartoon character or as a human, and that the level of body ownership was high and comparable with previous results
Summary
When you put on a head-tracked stereo head-mounted display and you look down towards yourself, if it has been so programmed you will see a life-sized virtual body substituting your real unseen body. Embodiment as a Cartoon Character perceptual illusion that the virtual body that they see is their own body, even though they know for sure that this is not the case This is referred to as a body ownership illusion, a concept inspired originally by the rubber hand illusion (RHI), where participants can feel a rubber hand as their own when it is seen to be touched, with touch that is felt synchronously on the corresponding real out-of-sight hand (Botvinick and Cohen, 1998). It is an example of an illusion resulting from multisensory stimulation (first person perspective over the hand, synchronous vision and touch) that provides evidence to the brain that the rubber hand is part of the body. Full body ownership in VR is discussed extensively in (Kilteni et al, 2012a) and body consciousness more generally in (Ehrsson and Stein, 2012; Blanke et al, 2015)
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