The subjective experience of embodying an avatar when immersed in virtual reality (VR) is known to support the sense of presence and to help with the interaction in a virtual environment. Virtual embodiment is often thought of as the consequence of replacement of the physical body by a virtual one, with a sense of agency for the avatar obtained by making the avatar’s body follow the user’s movements. This unidirectional motor link was, however, challenged by studies observing the opposite effect under different circumstances, for example, in a slow-motion context or when an arm movement was snapped on a predefined axis. These reports are, however, still rare or anecdotal. With the idea of a generalized bidirectional relationship between the user and the avatar in mind, we established a methodology to systematically provoke and study the circumstances under which participants follow the movements of their avatar during long repetitive movements without having been instructed to do so. A preliminary study confirmed that our virtual experimental setup, using full-body motion capture, avatar animation, and virtual mirrors, supports a strong sense of agency and body ownership for the avatar while enabling the experimental manipulation of the avatar’s movement. In the main experimental study, where participants performed repetitive upper- and lower-body movements while their avatar animations were either congruent or out-of-phase, we observed that almost all participants synchronized with their avatar at least once, for ∼47% of trials for lower limb movements and ∼38% for upper limb movements. Participants still reported low agency and ownership for the avatar under the incongruent condition, but, most interestingly, some of them also reported that their movements were not influenced by the avatar despite the behavioral effect. Our methodological approach and results contribute to the characterization of the conditions of occurrence of the self-avatar follower effect and, thereby, to identifying an enriched interaction design for VR, involving complex avatar–user mutual interdependencies.
This study attempts to evaluate whether a navigation technique based on scaling the user's avatar impacts the user's ability to correctly assess the size of virtual objects in a virtual environment. This study was realized during the CERN Open Days with data from 177 participants over eighteen years old. We were able to observe well-established phenomena such as the effect of interpupillary distance (IPD) on perception of scale, as well as original results associated with scaling factor and avatar embodiment. We observed that the user is more prone to overestimate object sizes from the Virtual Environment (VE) when provided with an avatar, while scaling the IPD according to the scale of the user's avatar contributes to a reduction in the overestimation of object sizes within the VE. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → User studies; Virtual reality; Interaction techniques.
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