The Self-Avatar Follower Effect in Virtual Reality

González-Franco, Mar; Cohn, Brian A.; Ofek, Eyal; Burin, Dalila; Maselli, Antonella

doi:10.1109/vr46266.2020.1580500165557

Cited by 21 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 85 publications

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“…However, none of the participants explicitly reported noticing that their motor behavior (i.e., drawing) was influenced by the motion of the virtual body, since they reported that they were always drawing straight lines, even in the condition where they saw the virtual body drawing ellipses. A similar behavior was also recently reported by Gonzalez-Franco et al 51 . Future research is needed in order to better understand this phenomenon.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Impact of visuomotor feedback on the embodiment of virtual hands detached from the body

Seinfeld

Müller

2020

Sci Rep

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It has been shown that mere observation of body discontinuity leads to diminished body ownership. However, the impact of body discontinuity has mainly been investigated in conditions where participants observe a collocated static virtual body from a first-person perspective. This study explores the influence of body discountinuity on the sense of embodiment, when rich visuomotor correlations between a real and an artificial virtual body are established. In two experiments, we evaluated body ownership and motor performance, when participants interacted in virtual reality either using virtual hands connected or disconnected from a body. We found that even under the presence of congruent visuomotor feedback, mere observation of body discontinuity resulted in diminished embodiment. Contradictory evidence was found in relation to motor performance, where further research is needed to understand the role of visual body discontinuity in motor tasks. Preliminary findings on physiological reactions to a threat were also assessed, indicating that body visual discontinuity does not differently impact threat-related skin conductance responses. The present results are in accordance with past evidence showing that body discontinuity negatively impacts embodiment. However, further research is needed to understand the influence of visuomotor feedback and body morphological congruency on motor performance and threat-related physiological reactions.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Impact of visuomotor feedback on the embodiment of virtual hands detached from the body

Seinfeld

Müller

2020

Sci Rep

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“…The results from this study demonstrated that virtual reality reflection therapy significantly improves postural balance and gait after four weeks of 30-min training sessions, five days a week [ 88 ]. VR systems are particularly important in the context of motor disorders because they are a potential tool to control and modulate on-line the motor behaviour of the user through the interplay between motor control loop mechanisms and the effects of embodiment that could drive and “attract” performed movement as in the “self-avatar follower effect” [ 89 ], the line-circle experiment [ 90 ].…”

Section: Virtual Body Ownership Illusions For Mental Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Virtual Body Ownership Illusions for Mental Health: A Narrative Review

Matamala-Gomez

Maselli

Malighetti

et al. 2021

JCM

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Over the last 20 years, virtual reality (VR) has been widely used to promote mental health in populations presenting different clinical conditions. Mental health does not refer only to the absence of psychiatric disorders but to the absence of a wide range of clinical conditions that influence people’s general and social well-being such as chronic pain, neurological disorders that lead to motor o perceptual impairments, psychological disorders that alter behaviour and social cognition, or physical conditions like eating disorders or present in amputees. It is known that an accurate perception of oneself and of the surrounding environment are both key elements to enjoy mental health and well-being, and that both can be distorted in patients suffering from the clinical conditions mentioned above. In the past few years, multiple studies have shown the effectiveness of VR to modulate such perceptual distortions of oneself and of the surrounding environment through virtual body ownership illusions. This narrative review aims to review clinical studies that have explored the manipulation of embodied virtual bodies in VR for improving mental health, and to discuss the current state of the art and the challenges for future research in the context of clinical care.

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“…For the duration of all of the trials of both phases, groundreaction forces were recorded at a 1000 Hz sampling-rate. These forces were collected as an additional measure of the strength of the perceptual illusion of walking that was induced, given previous studies have shown that muscle vibrations can trigger actual movements of small amplitude (Duclos et al, 2014) and that embodiment of an avatar can lead the user to follow the avatars position (Asai, 2014) or movements (Burin et al, 2019;Gonzalez-Franco et al, 2020). Raw ground-reaction force were smoothed using a 2nd order, 499 point Savitzky-Golay filter.…”

Section: Data Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It has been shown that one can be embodied in the body of a child (Banakou et al, 2013;Tajadura-Jiménez et al, 2017) or a body of different gender (Lopez et al, 2019;Schulze et al, 2019), ethnicity (Maister et al, 2013(Maister et al, , 2015 or body shape (Normand et al, 2011;Kilteni et al, 2012b), for example. Embodiment has been shown to have an effect on motor control (Burin et al, 2019;Gonzalez-Franco et al, 2020) and, specifically, on gait rehabilitation (Liu et al, 2020;Willaert et al, 2020;Hamzeheinejad et al, 2021;Keshner and Lamontagne, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Proprioceptive Stimulation Added to a Walking Self-Avatar Enhances the Illusory Perception of Walking in Static Participants

Labbé

Kouakoua

Aïssaoui

et al. 2021

Front. Virtual Real.

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When immersed in virtual reality, users who view their body as a co-located virtual avatar that reflects their movements, generally develop a sense of embodiment whereby they perceive the virtual body to be their own. One aspect of the sense of embodiment is the feeling of agency over the avatar, i.e., the feeling that one is producing the movements of the avatar. In contexts such as physical rehabilitation, telepresence and gaming, it may be useful to induce a strong sense of agency in users who cannot produce movements or for whom it is not practical to do so. Being able to feel agency over a walking avatar without having to produce walking movements could be especially valuable. Muscle vibrations have been shown to produce the proprioceptive perception of movements, without any movement on the part of the user. The objectives of the current study were to: 1-determine if the addition of lower-limb muscle-vibrations with gait-like patterns to a walking avatar can increase the illusory perception of walking in healthy individuals who are standing still; 2-compare the effects of the complexity of the vibration patterns and of their synchronicity on the sense of agency and on the illusory perception of walking. Thirty participants viewed a walking avatar from a first-person perspective, either without muscle vibrations or with one of four different patterns of vibrations. These five conditions were presented pairwise in a two-alternative forced choice paradigm and individually presented, after which participants answered an embodiment questionnaire. The displacement of center of pressure of the participants was measured throughout the experiment. The results show that all patterns of proprioceptive stimulation increased the sense of agency to a similar degree. However, the condition in which the proprioceptive feedback was realistic and temporally aligned with the avatar’s leg movements led to significantly larger anteroposterior sway of the center of pressure. The frequency of this sway matched the cadence of the avatar’s gait. Thus, congruent and realistic proprioceptive stimulation increases the feeling of agency, the illusory perception of walking and the motor responses of the participants when viewing a walking avatar from a first-person perspective.

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The Self-Avatar Follower Effect in Virtual Reality

Cited by 21 publications

References 85 publications

Impact of visuomotor feedback on the embodiment of virtual hands detached from the body

Impact of visuomotor feedback on the embodiment of virtual hands detached from the body

Virtual Body Ownership Illusions for Mental Health: A Narrative Review

Proprioceptive Stimulation Added to a Walking Self-Avatar Enhances the Illusory Perception of Walking in Static Participants

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