The Illusion of Animal Body Ownership and Its Potential for Virtual Reality Games
This work addresses the problem of enhancing immersive experiences in virtual reality games and education by exploring nonhumanoid embodiment, though it is incremental as it builds on existing research.
The study investigated whether virtual body ownership, previously studied with humanoid avatars, can be extended to virtual animals like spiders or bats, finding that it is applicable and can sometimes outperform human-like avatars.
Virtual reality offers the unique possibility to experience a virtual representation as our own body. In contrast to previous research that predominantly studied this phenomenon for humanoid avatars, our work focuses on virtual animals. In this paper, we discuss different body tracking approaches to control creatures such as spiders or bats and the respective virtual body ownership effects. Our empirical results demonstrate that virtual body ownership is also applicable for nonhumanoids and can even outperform human-like avatars in certain cases. An additional survey confirms the general interest of people in creating such experiences and allows us to initiate a broad discussion regarding the applicability of animal embodiment for educational and entertainment purposes.