Does distance matter? Embodiment and perception of personalized avatars in relation to the self-observation distance in virtual reality

Abstract

Virtual reality applications employing avatar embodiment typically use virtual mirrors to allow users to perceive their digital selves not only from a first-person but also from a holistic third-person perspective. However, due to distance-related biases such as the distance compression effect or a reduced relative rendering resolution, the self-observation distance (SOD) between the user and the virtual mirror might influence how users perceive their embodied avatar. Our article systematically investigates the effects of a short (1 m), middle (2.5 m), and far (4 m) SOD between users and mirror on the perception of their personalized and self-embodied avatars. The avatars were photorealistic reconstructed using state-of-the-art photogrammetric methods. Thirty participants repeatedly faced their real-time animated self-embodied avatars in each of the three SOD conditions, where they were repeatedly altered in their body weight, and participants rated the 1) sense of embodiment, 2) body weight perception, and 3) affective appraisal towards their avatar. We found that the different SODs are unlikely to influence any of our measures except for the perceived body weight estimation difficulty. Here, the participants perceived the difficulty significantly higher for the farthest SOD. We further found that the participants’ self-esteem significantly impacted their ability to modify their avatar’s body weight to their current body weight and that it positively correlated with the perceived attractiveness of the avatar. Additionally, the participants’ concerns about their body shape affected how eerie they perceived their avatars. The participants’ self-esteem and concerns about their body shape influenced the perceived body weight estimation difficulty. We conclude that the virtual mirror in embodiment scenarios can be freely placed and varied at a distance of one to four meters from the user without expecting major effects on the perception of the avatar.

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

“…Moreover, an avatar's holistic characterization can be altered by the context in which it is presented. For example, the sense of an avatar "self-similarity" (also named truthfulness) can be altered by how the user visually attend the avatar [120]. Hence, given its subjective nature a holistic description can be seen as a probability for a given avatar to be associated with the target concept, which is similar to some previous descriptions of subjective concepts in VR [105].…”

The Impact of Avatar and Environment Congruence on Plausibility, Embodiment, Presence, and the Proteus Effect in Virtual Reality

“…3, right). Following Wolf et al [66], we kept the distance to the mirror around 1.7 m, where no distance-related influence is expected. Participants could control their avatar's fingers using the touch sensors of the controllers.…”

“If It’s Not Me It Doesn’t Make a Difference” - The Impact of Avatar Personalization on user Experience and Body Awareness in Virtual Reality

“…The VR system consisted of a Valve Index Head-Mounted Display (HMD) [74] and two Valve Index controllers (Knuckles) tracked by three SteamVR Base Stations 2.0. The cable-bound HMD provided a resolution of 1440 × 1600 px per eye, a refresh rate of 144 Hz, and a total field of view of 109.4 × 114.1 • [80]. It was driven by a highend gaming PC with an Intel Core i7-9700K, an Nvidia RTX2080 TI, and 32 GB RAM running Windows 10.…”

“…1). Following the guidelines for mirror placement by Wolf et al [80], the participants' position was determined by rendering a position marker on the floor at a distance of 1.5 m in front of the mirror. Left to the mirror, we added a whiteboard to display experimental instructions.…”