Towards a Digital Body: The Virtual Arm Illusion

By Mel Slater, Daniel Pérez-Marcos, H. Ehrsson, Maria V. Sanchez-Vives. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2008

567 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The integration of the human brain with computers is an interesting new area of applied neuroscience, where one application is replacement of a person's real body by a virtual representation. Here we demonstrate that a virtual limb can be made to feel part of your body if appropriate multisensory correlations are provided. We report an illusion that is invoked through tactile stimulation on a person's hidden real right hand with synchronous virtual visual stimulation on an aligned 3D stereo virtual arm projecting horizontally out of their shoulder. An experiment with 21 male participants showed displacement of ownership towards the virtual hand, as illustrated by questionnaire responses and proprioceptive drift. A control experiment with asynchronous tapping was carried out with a different set of 20 male participants who did not experience the illusion. After 5 min of stimulation the virtual arm rotated. Evidence suggests that the extent of the illusion was also correlated with the degree of muscle activity onset in the right arm as measured by EMG during this period that the arm was rotating, for the synchronous but not the asynchronous condition. A completely virtual object can therefore be experienced as part of one's self, which opens up the possibility that an entire virtual body could be felt as one's own in future virtual reality applications or online games, and be an invaluable tool for the understanding of the brain mechanisms underlying body ownership.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9db7e64d88c06ca2b359857a504ab9aa943b5c58

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Human-Computer Interaction

Citations in the corpus

If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping (2008, unknown): “Likewise, experiencing ‘becoming’ a humanoid robot in tele-robotics and feeling ownership of simulated bodies in virtual reality applications would probably enhance user control, realism, and the feeling of ‘presence’ [21,22,23,50].”
MSc Thesis (2011, result): “Our conclusion of the improvement that virtual reality has on the RHI strength in the visual-tactile condition concurs with previous studies that have shown the potential of virtual reality in similar experiments [9], [28], [5], [29], although most of these studies did not conclude the significant i”
The Impact of Avatar Personalization and Immersion on Virtual Body Ownership, Presence, and Emotional Response (2018, background): “The acceptance of and identiﬁcation with our virtual counterparts is called illusion of virtual body ownership (IVBO) [18, 27,42].”
My body in the brain: a neurocognitive model of body-ownership. (2010, unknown): “classic paradigm (Austen et al., 2004; Capelari et al., 2009; Durgin et al, 2007; Ehrsson, 2007; Ehrsson et al, 2007,2008; Hägni et al., 2008; Kammers et al., 2009; Kanayama, Sato & Ohira, 2007, 2008; Lenggenhager et al, 2007; Petkova & Ehrsson, 2008; Schütz-Bosbach et al., 2006, 2009; Slater et al.”
First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality (2010, background): “While the vast majority of work in this field has shown that it is possible to incorporate physical objects or video images of these into the body representation, it has also recently been shown that the same methods work with entirely virtual objects [11], [12], [13].”
Inducing Illusory Ownership of a Virtual Body (2009, methodology): “After the 5 min of BCI control as control questions, not indicating the illusion, but see the discussion about these in Section 4.2 of Slater et al. (2008a).”
The role of interaction in virtual embodiment: Effects of the virtual hand representation (2016, background): “Existing works mainly focused on the effects of visuo-tactile [30], visuo-motor stimuli [24] or morphological changes [38].”
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…”
The Sense of Embodiment in Virtual Reality (2012, background): “Future studies should correlate both qualitative and quantitative data in order to get a fuller picture of their association with the sub-components of embodiment (e.g., Ehrsson, 2007; Slater et al., 2008; Slater, Spanlang, Sanchez-Vives, et al., 2010).”
Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality: The Body Shapes the Way We Play (2013, background): “The rubber hand illusion was shown to function in virtual reality to the same extent as in the original Botvinick and Cohen paper [18], with the difference that both the arm and the seen stimulus that was touching the virtual hand were represented only virtually.”
The effect of avatar realism in immersive social virtual realities (2017, background): “The developed simulation system provides a social VR where users can inspect their own virtual body to successfully evoke IVBO and to engage in a virtual encounter with a social interaction partner later on.”