Publication details
Investigating Body Transfer Illusion from Human to Monkey Body
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | 2018 International Conference on Intelligent Systems (IS 2018) |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8710499 |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/IS.2018.8710499 |
| Keywords | virtual reality; body transfer illusion; sensors |
| Description | This paper presents a virtual reality study examining the magnitude of embodiment into a human and nonhuman avatar. It examines the user experience of inhabiting the body of animals in immersive virtual environments. Participants embodied in a human-like virtual avatar experienced body transfer illusion into a body of a monkey. The experiment consisted of two variants. In the first variant, participants did not have the ability to control the hands inside the Monkey avatar, they were instructed to just look over the scene from their fixed point of view. In the second variant, the ability to move arms and hands of the Monkey avatar was enabled, and this fact was articulated to the test subjects. Results suggest that the body transfer illusion is indeed possible. The study also indicates that the actual shape or visual representation of the body matters less than the amount and diversity of stimuli, and possibilities of controlling the avatar's body. Results of this study can be leveraged in the design of e-learning, health-care, and affective computing platforms, where amplification of the human-oriented design using malleable virtual avatars can bring additional feedback channel to the users. |