First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality

Abstract

BackgroundAltering the normal association between touch and its visual correlate can result in the illusory perception of a fake limb as part of our own body. Thus, when touch is seen to be applied to a rubber hand while felt synchronously on the corresponding hidden real hand, an illusion of ownership of the rubber hand usually occurs. The illusion has also been demonstrated using visuomotor correlation between the movements of the hidden real hand and the seen fake hand. This type of paradigm has been used with respect to the whole body generating out-of-the-body and body substitution illusions. However, such studies have only ever manipulated a single factor and although they used a form of virtual reality have not exploited the power of immersive virtual reality (IVR) to produce radical transformations in body ownership.Principal FindingsHere we show that a first person perspective of a life-sized virtual human female body that appears to substitute the male subjects' own bodies was sufficient to generate a body transfer illusion. This was demonstrated subjectively by questionnaire and physiologically through heart-rate deceleration in response to a threat to the virtual body. This finding is in contrast to earlier experimental studies that assume visuotactile synchrony to be the critical contributory factor in ownership illusions. Our finding was possible because IVR allowed us to use a novel experimental design for this type of problem with three independent binary factors: (i) perspective position (first or third), (ii) synchronous or asynchronous mirror reflections and (iii) synchrony or asynchrony between felt and seen touch.ConclusionsThe results support the notion that bottom-up perceptual mechanisms can temporarily override top down knowledge resulting in a radical illusion of transfer of body ownership. The research also illustrates immersive virtual reality as a powerful tool in the study of body representation and experience, since it supports experimental manipulations that would otherwise be infeasible, with the technology being mature enough to represent human bodies and their motion.

Illusory self-identification with an avatar reduces arousal responses to painful stimuli

“…Interestingly, although we presented avatars that matched the gender of our participants, the avatars appearances were different with respect to the specific hair style, or the skin colour of participants. However, our results indicate that primarily the anatomical configuration of the avatar defined the possibility to increase the self-identification with it, and not its actual similarity with participant's body, congruently with the finding that even an opposite gender avatar could induce embodiment effects [56,57].…”

Geovisualisation of Relief in a Virtual Reality System on the Basis of Low-Level Aerial Imagery

“…In addition, this paper aimed to further the research done by Slater et al (2010) concerning the possibility of using VR for a more immersive exploration of 3D geovisualisation in the VR FPV mode. Authors believe that the integration of UAV-based DTMs into the VR system may be very important in anti-collision systems, in manual navigation of the UAV and in UAV simulators.…”

Avatar Embodiment. Towards a Standardized Questionnaire

“…For example, some adaptations account for a whole-body substitution in which the body is collocated and in front of a virtual mirror (Slater et al, 2010b;Borland et al, 2013), compared to a dislocated body part shown in experiments with the RHI (IJsselsteijn et al, 2006;González-Franco et al, 2014). Yet, the many variations of the questionnaire in the literature make it impossible to compare results across experiments.…”