First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality

By Mel Slater, Bernhard Spanlang, Maria V. Sanchez-Vives, Olaf Blanke. PLoS ONE, 2010

1,036 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background Altering the normal association between touch and its visual correlate can result in the illusory perception of a fake limb as part of our own body. Thus, when touch is seen to be applied to a rubber hand while felt synchronously on the corresponding hidden real hand, an illusion of ownership of the rubber hand usually occurs. The illusion has also been demonstrated using visuomotor correlation between the movements of the hidden real hand and the seen fake hand. This type of paradigm has been used with respect to the whole body generating out-of-the-body and body substitution illusions. However, such studies have only ever manipulated a single factor and although they used a form of virtual reality have not exploited the power of immersive virtual reality (IVR) to produce radical transformations in body ownership. Principal Findings Here we show that a first person perspective of a life-sized virtual human female body that appears to substitute the male subjects' own bodies was sufficient to generate a body transfer illusion. This was demonstrated subjectively by questionnaire and physiologically through heart-rate deceleration in response to a threat to the virtual body. This finding is in contrast to earlier experimental studies that assume visuotactile synchrony to be the critical contributory factor in ownership illusions. Our finding was possible because IVR allowed us to use a novel experimental design for this type of problem with three independent binary factors: (i) perspective position (first or third), (ii) synchronous or asynchronous mirror reflections and (iii) synchrony or asynchrony between felt and seen touch. Conclusions The results support the notion that bottom-up perceptual mechanisms can temporarily override top down knowledge resulting in a radical illusion of transfer of body ownership. The research also illustrates immersive virtual reality as a powerful tool in the study of body representation and experience, since it supports experimental manipulations that would otherwise be infeasible, with the technology being mature enough to represent human bodies and their motion.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3642b59776f0fa5d51a0cda428664108de88989b

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Citations in the corpus

Virtual Reality for Enhanced Ecological Validity and Experimental Control in the Clinical, Affective and Social Neurosciences (2015, background): “…the impact of virtual embodiment on implicit social cognitions related to the other’s age (Banakou et al., 2013); body shape/size (van der Hoort et al., 2011; Normand et al., 2011; Preston and Ehrsson, 2014); gender groups (Slater et al., 2010); and race (Maister et al., 2013; Peck et al., 2013).”
Real Virtuality: A Code of Ethical Conduct. Recommendations for Good Scientific Practice and the Consumers of VR-Technology (2016, background): “One central area of concern has to do with illusions of embodiment , in which one has the feeling of being embodied other than in one’s actual physical body (Petkova and Ehrsson, 2008; Slater et al., 2010).”
An Interoceptive Predictive Coding Model of Conscious Presence (2011, background): “Several recent studies have used VR to generalize the rubber-hand illusion to induce experiences of heautoscopy (Petkova and Ehrsson, 2008; Blanke and Metzinger, 2009) and body transfer into a VE (Slater et al., 2010b) [Heautoscopy is intermediate between autoscopy and full-blown out of body experie”
The Impact of Avatar Personalization and Immersion on Virtual Body Ownership, Presence, and Emotional Response (2018, background): “, [43, 45]) as well as in lesser immersive VR systems like CAVEs (see, e.”
The Ethics of Realism in Virtual and Augmented Reality (2020, background): “In VR it is possible to give people the illusion that they have another body (Yee et al., 2009; Slater et al., 2010), and that their body has changed in some fundamental way.”
A Survey of Presence and Related Concepts (2017, background): “Slater et al. have explored the illusion of body ownership with regard to a purely virtual body [127].”
Illusory ownership of a virtual child body causes overestimation of object sizes and implicit attitude changes (2013, result): “This result is not surprising and is in line with earlier results that it is possible to generate such illusions with different body forms (15, 19, 21, 23), including very small or large bodies (22).”
Experiencing Nature: Embodying Animals in Immersive Virtual Environments Increases Inclusion of Nature in Self and Involvement With Nature (2016, background): “A 15-item, 5-point interval scale assessed how much the participants felt as if they had become the virtual cow, adapted from Slater et al. (2010).”
Virtual reality in neuroscience research and therapy (2011, background): “This is strikingly demonstrated by the effect known as the body-transfer illusio”
Enhancing Our Lives with Immersive Virtual Reality (2016, background): “…work on building virtual embodiment technology (Spanlang et al., 2013, 2014), studying the conditions that can lead to such body ownership illusions (Slater et al., 2008, 2009, 2010b; Sanchez-Vives et al., 2010; Borland et al., 2013; González-Franco et al., 2013; Llobera et al., 2013; Maselli…”
Positive Technology: Using Interactive Technologies to Promote Positive Functioning (2012, neutral): “72 Additionally, we have classiﬁed positive technologies according to their effects on these three features of personal experience: Hedonic : technologies used to induce positive and pleasant experiences; Eudaimonic : technologies used to support individuals in reaching engaging and…”
Virtual Embodiment of White People in a Black Virtual Body Leads to a Sustained Reduction in Their Implicit Racial Bias (2016, methodology): “Slater et al. (2010) used virtual reality to similar eﬀect—when participants in a head-tracked head mounted display delivered VR and looked down toward their real body and in a virtual mirror they would see a life-sized virtual body, including the movements of the virtual head that were synchronous…”
Avatar Embodiment. Towards a Standardized Questionnaire (2018, neutral): “For example, some adaptations account for a whole-body substitution in which the body is collocated and in front of a virtual mirror (Slater et al., 2010b; Borland et al., 2013), compared to a dislocated body part shown in experiments with the RHI (IJsselsteijn et al., 2006; González-Franco et al.,…”
The effect of avatar realism in immersive social virtual realities (2017, methodology): “Avatar variants explored include change of gender [Slater et al. 2010], posture [De la Peña et al. 2010], figure [Normand et al. 2011], skin color [Peck et al. 2013], age and size [Banakou et al. 2013], or degree of realism and anthropomorphism [Latoschik et al. 2016; Lugrin et al. 2015; Roth et…”