The impact of avatar owner visual similarity on body ownership in immersive virtual reality
In this paper we report on an investigation of the effects of a self avatar's visual similarity to a user's actual appearance, on their perceptions of the avatar in an immersive virtual reality (IVR) experience. We conducted a user study to examine the participant's sense of body ownership, presence and visual realism under three levels of avatar owner visual similarity: (L1) an avatar reconstructed from real imagery of the participant's appearance, (L2) a cartoon like virtual avatar created by a 3D artist for each participant, where the avatar shoes and clothing mimic that of the participant, but using a low fidelity model, and (L3) a cartoon like virtual avatar with a pre defined appearance for the shoes and clothing. Surprisingly, the results indicate that the participants generally exhibited the highest sense of body ownership and presence when inhabiting the cartoon like virtual avatar mimicking the outft of the participant (L2) despite the relatively low participant similarity. We present our experiment and main findings, also, discuss the potential impact of a self avatar's visual differences on human perceptions in IVR.
VRST