Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality: The Body Shapes the Way We Play

By Konstantina Kilteni, Ilias Bergstrom, Mel Slater. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2013

365 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It has been shown that it is possible to generate perceptual illusions of ownership in immersive virtual reality (IVR) over a virtual body seen from first person perspective, in other words over a body that visually substitutes the person's real body. This can occur even when the virtual body is quite different in appearance from the person's real body. However, investigation of the psychological, behavioral and attitudinal consequences of such body transformations remains an interesting problem with much to be discovered. Thirty six Caucasian people participated in a between-groups experiment where they played a West-African Djembe hand drum while immersed in IVR and with a virtual body that substituted their own. The virtual hand drum was registered with a physical drum. They were alongside a virtual character that played a drum in a supporting, accompanying role. In a baseline condition participants were represented only by plainly shaded white hands, so that they were able merely to play. In the experimental condition they were represented either by a casually dressed dark-skinned virtual body (Casual Dark-Skinned - CD) or by a formal suited light-skinned body (Formal Light-Skinned - FL). Although participants of both groups experienced a strong body ownership illusion towards the virtual body, only those with the CD representation showed significant increases in their movement patterns for drumming compared to the baseline condition and compared with those embodied in the FL body. Moreover, the stronger the illusion of body ownership in the CD condition, the greater this behavioral change. A path analysis showed that the observed behavioral changes were a function of the strength of the illusion of body ownership towards the virtual body and its perceived appropriateness for the drumming task. These results demonstrate that full body ownership illusions can lead to substantial behavioral and possibly cognitive changes depending on the appearance of the virtual body. This could be important for many applications such as learning, education, training, psychotherapy and rehabilitation using IVR.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ac55f7fd1a35eb482b5536f838d7c9e64bc3d746

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Citations in the corpus

Virtual reality and augmented reality in social learning spaces: a literature review (2020, background): “…is still a developing area, as it has also been noted that embodying others in VR experiences may also enhance stereotypes rather than reduce them (Kilteni et al. 2013; Nakamura 1995), but it presents an opportunity to use VR/AR technology to better connect learners with new and different…”
The Impact of Avatar Personalization and Immersion on Virtual Body Ownership, Presence, and Emotional Response (2018, background): “Changing the visual and behavioral characteristic of a user’s avatar will potentially also change the behavior [21], attitude [4, 35], and emotional involvement [14] of the user in control of the avatar.”
Enhancing Our Lives with Immersive Virtual Reality (2016, methodology): “…been used to give adults the experience of being a child (Banakou et al., 2013), has been shown to affect motor behavior while playing the drums (Kilteni et al., 2013), and has been used to give people the illusory sensation of having carried out an action that they had in fact not carried…”
A LITERATURE REVIEW ON IMMERSIVE VIRTUAL REALITY IN EDUCATION: STATE OF THE ART AND PERSPECTIVES. (2015, background): “A study shows how reducing a person's height resulted in more negative views of the self in comparison with other people and increased levels of paranoia [51] and another demonstrated how the perception of out body changes the way we play drums [52].”
Illusory ownership of a virtual child body causes overestimation of object sizes and implicit attitude changes (2013, background): “Our current results suggest the intriguing possibility that this even extends to perceptual processing and implicit attitudes and behaviors (40).”
The role of interaction in virtual embodiment: Effects of the virtual hand representation (2016, background): “Existing studies have focused on constrained interactions with the virtual environment, limited to pushing virtual buttons [10], touching landmarks [20] or drumming [14].”
Real Virtuality: A Code of Ethical Conduct. Recommendations for Good Scientific Practice and the Consumers of VR-Technology (2016, background): “This effect occurs when subjects “conform to the behavior that they believe others would expect them to have” based on the appearance of their avatar (Yee and Bailenson, 2007, p. 274; Kilteni et al., 2013) .”
Virtual Embodiment of White People in a Black Virtual Body Leads to a Sustained Reduction in Their Implicit Racial Bias (2016, background): “In Kilteni et al. (2013) and Peck et al. (2013) all participants were light-skinned but the level of body ownership did not diﬀer between a light-skinned, dark-skinned or even a purple body.”
AI-generated characters for supporting personalized learning and well-being (2021, background): “Researchers have demonstrated that embodying a character in virtual reality can positively influence people’s behaviours and abilities in multiple ways, from supporting expressivity 28 to mitigating negative stereotypes 29 , and enhancing problem-solving skills.”
Avatar Embodiment. Towards a Standardized Questionnaire (2018, background): “The embodiment itself can be modulated by the type, race and look of the avatar participants embody (Hershﬁeld et al., 2011; Kilteni et al., 2013; Peck et al., 2013).”