Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality: The Body Shapes the Way We Play

Abstract

Fig. 1. The first person perspective of the participant looking down. (A) in the baseline condition participants were represented by flat shaded white hands. In the between-groups experimental conditions they either had (B) a casually dressed dark-skinned body or (C) a formally dressed light-skinned body. Abstract-It has been shown that it is possible to generate perceptual illusions of ownership in immersive virtual reality (IVR) over a virtual body seen from first person perspective, in other words over a body that visually substitutes the person's real body. This can occur even when the virtual body is quite different in appearance from the person's real body. However, investigation of the psychological, behavioral and attitudinal consequences of such body transformations remains an interesting problem with much to be discovered. Thirty six Caucasian people participated in a between-groups experiment where they played a West-African Djembe hand drum while immersed in IVR and with a virtual body that substituted their own. The virtual hand drum was registered with a physical drum. They were alongside a virtual character that played a drum in a supporting, accompanying role. In a baseline condition participants were represented only by plainly shaded white hands, so that they were able merely to play. In the experimental condition they were represented either by a casually dressed dark-skinned virtual body (Casual Dark-Skinned-CD) or by a formal suited light-skinned body (Formal Light-Skinned-FL). Although participants of both groups experienced a strong body ownership illusion towards the virtual body, only those with the CD representation showed significant increases in their movement patterns for drumming compared to the baseline condition and compared with those embodied in the FL body. Moreover, the stronger the illusion of body ownership in the CD condition, the greater this behavioral change. A path analysis showed that the observed behavioral changes were a function of the strength of the illusion of body ownership towards the virtual body and its perceived appropriateness for the drumming task. These results demonstrate that full body ownership illusions can lead to substantial behavioral and possibly cognitive changes depending on the appearance of the virtual body. This could be important for many applications such as learning, education, training, psychotherapy and rehabilitation using IVR.

Avatar Embodiment. Towards a Standardized Questionnaire

“…Aspects such as participant's behavior or their physiology are heavily influenced by the embodiment score (González-Franco et al, 2014;Padrao et al, 2016;Slater and Sanchez-Vives, 2016). The embodiment itself can be modulated by the type, race and look of the avatar participants embody (Hershfield et al, 2011;Kilteni et al, 2013;Peck et al, 2013). Therefore, potentially any manipulation to the participants' avatar might have strong changes on their performance during and after their VR experience.…”

“…Embodiment is not only elicited in lookalike or gender/race consistent self-avatars, but is also possible with avatars of a different gender (Kilteni et al, 2013), shape (Yee et al, 2009;Normand et al, 2011;Kilteni et al, 2012b;Won et al, 2015), racial group , or age (Banakou et al, 2013).…”

“…Embodying taller avatars increased user ability to negotiate more confidently, compared to users embodied in shorter avatars (Yee and Bailenson, 2007;Yee et al, 2009). Professionally-dressed self-avatars reduced participant's musicality when playing the bongo (Kilteni et al, 2013). Users even changed their saving behavior after embodying avatars that looked like older versions of themselves (Hershfield et al, 2011), and showed a modified psychological treatment behavior when embodying an avatar representing Sigmund Freud (Osimo et al, 2015).…”

Multi-Destination Beaming: Apparently Being in Three Places at Once through Robotic and Virtual Embodiment

“…By giving participants visual feedback that their real body had been replaced by a mannequin body and providing synchronous tactile simulation, the experiment was able to elicit the illusion of full-body ownership over the mannequin body. This phenomenon has been successfully replicated several times in virtual reality (Slater and Sanchez-Vives, 2014) and various aspects of the illusion have been tested, such as varying the racial appearance of the virtual body (Kilteni et al, 2013;Maister et al, 2013;Peck et al, 2013), limb size (Kilteni et al, 2012), body size (Normand et al, 2011), and also by modifying the age of the virtual body (Banakou et al, 2013). Over several studies, certain factors have been found to have a major effect on the illusion, such as first-person perspective, and the body having a human morphology (Maselli and Slater, 2013).…”

“…In addition to the questions related to task performance, the visitors were also asked questions related to the BOI and agency twice, once for each robot ( Table 2). The embodiment questionnaire, designed based on a previous study that was carried out using the same robot (Kishore et al, 2014), was not given for VD3 since high ownership illusions and high levels of agency have been reported in various previous studies using the exact same setup (Banakou et al, 2013;Kilteni et al, 2013;Peck et al, 2013). The locals were asked two questions regarding their experience (Table 3).…”