Abstract
This paper studies the sense of embodiment of virtual avatars in Mixed Reality (MR) environments visualized with an Optical See-Through display. We investigated whether the content of the surrounding environment could impact the user’s perception of their avatar, when embodied from a first-person perspective. To do so, we conducted a user study comparing the sense of embodiment toward virtual robot hands in three environment contexts which included progressive quantities of virtual content: real content only, mixed virtual/real content, and virtual content only. Taken together, our results suggest that users tend to accept virtual hands as their own more easily when the environment contains both virtual and real objects (mixed context), allowing them to better merge the two “worlds”. We discuss these results and raise research questions for future work to consider.
Highlights
In Virtual Reality (VR), humans were shown to have the ability to experience ownership toward virtual bodies, called self-avatars (Bainbridge, 2004)
The present study explores how the Sense of Embodiment (SoE) of virtual self-avatars is expressed in Mixed Reality (MR) environments and whether the mixing of virtuality and reality impacts it
This paper presents an experiment exploring the influence of the presence of virtual/real content on the SoE in MR
Summary
In Virtual Reality (VR), humans were shown to have the ability to experience ownership toward virtual bodies, called self-avatars (Bainbridge, 2004). Such avatars have been increasingly used in Mixed Reality (MR) where users can see virtual content embedded into the real world. When embodied in MR, self-avatars allow users to see themselves in their own environment, but inside a body with a different shape, size, or appearance. This ability finds applications in the entertainment and education fields (Javornik et al, 2017; Hoang et al, 2018), and in the psychomedical areas. By applying coherent sensory feedback, MR technologies can create similar virtual Body Ownership Illusions (BOI) as the ones previously witnessed in virtual environments (Maselli and Slater, 2013; Wolf and Mal, 2020)
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