Construction of the Virtual Embodiment Questionnaire (VEQ)

Abstract

Fig. 1. Factors addressed by the VEQ. Virtual body ownership (a) which refers to the perception of perceiving a virtual body as the own, as the source of all sensations; Agency (b), which refers to the perception of control over a virtual body, and through that, control over events in the environment; Change (c) which refers to the change in the perceived body schema due to the stimulation. The user is depicted in grey; the virtual avatar is depicted in orange. Abstract-User embodiment is important for many virtual reality (VR) applications, for example, in the context of social interaction, therapy, training, or entertainment. However, there is no data-driven and validated instrument to empirically measure the perceptual aspects of embodiment, necessary to reliably evaluate this important phenomenon. To provide a method to assess components of virtual embodiment in a reliable and consistent fashion, we constructed a Virtual Embodiment Questionnaire (VEQ). We reviewed previous literature to identify applicable constructs and questionnaire items, and performed a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on the data from three experiments (N = 196). The analysis confirmed three factors: (1) ownership of a virtual body, (2) agency over a virtual body, and (3) the perceived change in the body schema. A fourth study (N = 22) was conducted to confirm the reliability and validity of the scale, by investigating the impacts of latency and latency jitter present in the simulation. We present the proposed scale and study results and discuss resulting implications.

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“…In line with Klasnja et al (2011), we believe that knowing why is crucial to HCI researchers as they attempt to develop effective systems. Furthermore, since the framework includes established factors (psychological and technological), we recommend researchers following Wienrich and Gramlich (2020) to consider measurements that account for corresponding measurements assessing the impact or rather the manifestations of these effects (behavioral effects: e.g., stage of change questionnaire (Marcus et al, 1992) or index of habit strength (Verplanken and Orbell, 2003); immersive features and perceptions: e.g., virtual embodiment questionnaire (Roth and Latoschik, 2020), group presence questionnaire (Schubert et al, 2001) or networked minds measure of social presence (Biocca and Harms, 2003).…”

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“…Therefore, only the Perception of walking question results are directly compared to the results of previous studies, as they also included such a question. Recently, two validated questionnaires have been proposed (Roth and Latoschik, 2020;Peck and Gonzalez-Franco, 2021).…”

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