Where am I in virtual reality?

Albert H Van Der Veer,Hong Yu Wong,Betty J Mohler,Matthew R Longo,Adrian J T Alsmith,Jane Elizabeth Aspell

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0204358

Abstract

It is currently not well understood whether people experience themselves to be located in one or more specific part(s) of their body. Virtual reality (VR) is increasingly used as a tool to study aspects of bodily perception and self-consciousness, due to its strong experimental control and ease in manipulating multi-sensory aspects of bodily experience. To investigate where people self-locate in their body within virtual reality, we asked participants to point directly at themselves with a virtual pointer, in a VR headset. In previous work employing a physical pointer, participants mainly located themselves in the upper face and upper torso. In this study, using a VR headset, participants mainly located themselves in the upper face. In an additional body template task where participants pointed at themselves on a picture of a simple body outline, participants pointed most often to the upper torso, followed by the (upper) face. These results raise the question as to whether head-mounted virtual reality might alter where people locate themselves making them more “head-centred”.

Highlights

People locate themselves where their bodies are
The primary aim of the current paper is to investigate where people locate themselves within their body in virtual reality (VR)
As in Alsmith and Longo [6], depending on this intersection with the body each response was coded as falling into one of seven bodily regions, based on individual body measurements: below the torso (= below the hips), lower torso (= between the hips and the elbows), upper torso (= between the elbows and the shoulders), neck (= between the shoulders and the chin), lower face (= between the chin and the nose), upper face (= between the nose and the top of the head (= total body height)), and above the head (= above total body height; this region is added for classification, because we found a substantial amount of pointing here)

Summary

Introduction

People locate themselves where their bodies are. Here we ask : Where do people locate themselves in their bodies? Currently it is unknown whether people locate themselves in one or more specific part(s) of their body. (1) Self-location as the bodily location people consider to be the centre from which they perceive the world, the centre of their first-person frame of reference, or egocentre [1,2]; (2) the bodily location people experience themselves to be in relative to external space [3]; (3) the location in or on their body where people experience themselves to be, or the part(s) of their bodies people associate themselves with the most [4,5].

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