Beyond Human

Abstract

Figure 1. We explore the potential of nonhuman avatars in VR games. The evaluation of our three escape room games for different animal types reveals that players enjoy the control over additional body parts, as such morphologies allow novel, refreshing interactions and enable superhuman abilities. ABSTRACTVirtual reality setups are particularly suited to create a tight bond between players and their avatars up to a degree where we start perceiving the virtual representation as our own body. We hypothesize that such an illusion of virtual body ownership (IVBO) has a particularly high, yet overlooked potential for nonhumanoid avatars. To validate our claim, we use the example of three very different creatures-a scorpion, a rhino, and a bird-to explore possible avatar controls and game mechanics based on specific animal abilities. A quantitative evaluation underpins the high game enjoyment arising from embodying such nonhuman morphologies, including additional body parts and obtaining respective superhuman skills, which allows us to derive a set of novel design implications. Furthermore, the experiment reveals a correlation between IVBO and game enjoyment, which is a further indication that nonhumanoid

Virtual Interiorities

“…These experiences use a virtual avatar to provide the user with an alternate perspective; the user occupies a foreign body within a contextualised virtual space. This contributes to what has been described as the illusion of body ownership, where people become connected to their virtual avatar and begin to perceive space-time through that body (Krekhov et al, 2019). This sense of embodiment is comprised of a sense of self-location, a sense of agency and a sense of body ownership (Bertrand et al, 2018).…”

Beyond my Real Body: Characterization, Impacts, Applications and Perspectives of “Dissimilar” Avatars in Virtual Reality

“…Finally, structural dissimilarities, which disrupt the mapping between users' motor control and avatars' movements, have been reported to decrease the level of agency [63,126]. In contrast, several studies also reported that diverse structural dissimilarities could elicit levels of agency comparable to avatars without structural dissimilarities [5,43,55]. Such results were obtained with avatars either presenting dissimilarities in terms of: structural proportions (e.g.…”

“…Interaction techniques are at the core of most of VR applications, they define the influence that a user can have on the VE and impact both objective (e.g., performance [5,72] or cognitive load [99]) and subjective (i.e., embodiment [1] or hedonic qualities [55,88]) aspects of the user experience. Gesture based direct manipulation is a class of interaction allowing users to interact with the VE in a similar way that they would do in the real-world, for example using hand gestures to grasp objects [5,94], or walking [1] in order to navigate in the VE.…”

“…an avatar which differs from the user's real body. A dissimilar avatar can either present subtle modifications which does not alter the anthropomorphic aspect of the avatar (e.g., another facial structure [6,7], skin tone [12,87], body proportion [80,98] or outfit [69]), or more extreme body change s (resulting for example in a robot [66], animal [55,85], avatar showing additional limbs [57,99], or with an abstract appearance [5,63]). Strictly speaking , any avatar is dissimilar, since even the most accurate 3D reconstruction technique does not perfectly reproduce the actual user appearance.…”

Iteratively Adapting Avatars using Task-Integrated Optimisation

“…Still other work has focused on non-humanoid bodies (e.g., [15,14,31]). For instance, Steptoe et al [31] explored ownership over an additional appendage -a tail.…”