A study on delivering full-body stimulation in user experience with virtual avatar

Abstract

A virtual avatar in virtual reality is a standing research interest that has been continuously studied in HCI as a means to allow more immersion in virtual reality. Body ownership illusion (BOI), which means ‘the phenomenon in which a virtual body feels like one’s own body’, is one of the important factors when using virtual avatar. In multi-sensory virtual reality in which various stimuli are delivered simultaneously, combination of multiple stimuli influences the user experience. In previous studies, visuomotor (VM) and visuotactile (VT) were used to induced BOI, but no study delivered both stimuli simultaneously to the whole body. In this study, we investigated how the two stimuli affect BOI when they are delivered to the whole body at the same time, and additionally measured user experiences such as presence, emotion, and virtual motion sickness. The results showed that BOI was high when VM is synchronous, but there was no significant difference according to synchrony of VT. In terms of presence, it was confirmed that VT affects only when VM is synchronous. In terms of emotion, both VM and VT affect valence. And in terms of virtual motion sickness, a statistical difference is not found. These results suggest that the synchrony of VM is more important in BOI, but the synchrony of VT can affect user experiences such as presence when VM is synchronous.