Petting a cat helps you incarnate the avatar: Influence of the emotions over embodiment in VR

Abstract

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.

The sense of embodiment in Virtual Reality and its assessment methods

“…More recent experiments show that users' emotions (Freeling et al, 2022), personality traits, and preferences play a role in the SoE as well (Burin et al, 2019). The locus of control (describing how people attribute the control they have over the outcome of events in their lives) impacts the SoE (Jeunet et al, 2018;Dewez et al, 2019).…”