The Impact Of Avatar-Owner Visual Similarity On Body Ownership In Immersive Virtual Reality

Keywords

Body ownership; HMD; Presence; Self-avatar; Virtual reality

Abstract

In this paper we report on an investigation of the effects of a self-avatar's visual similarity to a user's actual appearance, on their perceptions of the avatar in an immersive virtual reality (IVR) experience. We conducted a user study to examine the participant's sense of body ownership, presence and visual realism under three levels of avatar-owner visual similarity: (L1) an avatar reconstructed from real imagery of the participant's appearance, (L2) a cartoon-like virtual avatar created by a 3D artist for each participant, where the avatar shoes and clothing mimic that of the participant, but using a low-fidelity model, and (L3) a cartoon-like virtual avatar with a pre-defined appearance for the shoes and clothing. Surprisingly, the results indicate that the participants generally exhibited the highest sense of body ownership and presence when inhabiting the cartoon-like virtual avatar mimicking the outfit of the participant (L2), despite the relatively low participant similarity. We present our experiment and main findings, also, discuss the potential impact of a self-avatar's visual differences on human perceptions in IVR.

Publication Date

11-8-2017

Publication Title

Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology, VRST

Volume

Part F131944

Document Type

Article; Proceedings Paper

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1145/3139131.3141214

Socpus ID

85038580629 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/85038580629

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS