Thanks to its strong capacity to immerse users in virtual worlds, virtual reality can elicit various emotions with diverse environments. This aspect of virtual reality makes it an interesting and powerful tool in many fields, such as entertainment with scenarios based on a strong emotional implication, training in particular for social or communication skills, or even medical therapy with phobia or addiction treatment. However, in virtual reality the participant lives the experience through an avatar, and feels the emotion according to what happens to this avatar.This paper discusses the link between embodiment and emotional implication in virtual reality. In particular, we looked at how emotions and the sense of embodiment are correlated in virtual reality. Through an experiment, we demonstrate that the sense of embodiment is strongly correlated with the emotional experience of the virtual environment. The sense of embodiment is increased when the virtual scenarios make the participants feel strong emotions, whether those emotions are positive or negative. We also show that emotions mainly affects two sub-components of embodiment : the appearance and response sub-scales.

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.