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research article

The Critical Role of Self-Contact for Embodiment in Virtual Reality

Bovet, Sidney  
•
Debarba, Henrique Galvan
•
Herbelin, Bruno
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April 1, 2018
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

With the broad range of motion capture devices available on the market, it is now commonplace to directly control the limb movement of an avatar during immersion in a virtual environment. Here, we study how the subjective experience of embodying a full-body controlled avatar is influenced by motor alteration and self-contact mismatches. Self-contact is in particular a strong source of passive haptic feedback and we assume it to bring a clear benefit in terms of embodiment. For evaluating this hypothesis, we experimentally manipulate self-contacts and the virtual hand displacement relatively to the body. We introduce these body posture transformations to experimentally reproduce the imperfect or incorrect mapping between real and virtual bodies, with the goal of quantifying the limits of acceptance for distorted mapping on the reported body ownership and agency. We first describe how we exploit egocentric coordinate representations to perform a motion capture ensuring that real and virtual hands coincide whenever the real hand is in contact with the body. Then, we present a pilot study that focuses on quantifying our sensitivity to visuo-tactile mismatches. The results are then used to design our main study with two factors, offset (for self-contact) and amplitude (for movement amplification). Our main result shows that subjects' embodiment remains important, even when an artificially amplified movement of the hand was performed, but provided that correct self-contacts are ensured.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1109/TVCG.2018.2794658
Author(s)
Bovet, Sidney  
Debarba, Henrique Galvan
Herbelin, Bruno
Molla, Eray
Boulic, Ronan
Date Issued

2018-04-01

Published in
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Volume

24

Issue

4

Start page

1428

End page

1436

Subjects

Virtual Reality

•

Avatar

•

Embodiment

•

Agency

•

Body Ownership

•

Self-contact

•

Sensitivity

•

Haptic interfaces

•

Visualization

•

Virtual environments

Note

1077-2626 (c) 2018 IEEE. Translations and content mining are permitted for academic research only. Personal use is also permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.

URL

IEEE Explore Open Access

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8283639
Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
SCI-IC-RB  
LNCO  
CNP  
FunderGrant Number

Swiss foundations

HASLER foundation 16033

FNS

200020-159968

Available on Infoscience
February 15, 2018
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/144860
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