Are Embodied Avatars Harmful to our Self-Experience? The Impact of Virtual Embodiment on Body Awareness

Title of the Paper

Are Embodied Avatars Harmful to our Self-Experience? The Impact of Virtual Embodiment on Body Awareness

Bibliographic Information

• Research Domain: Virtual Reality (VR), Perception of Virtual Bodies, and Mental Health
• Keywords: Sense of Embodiment, Virtual Reality, Interoception, Body Ownership, Sense of Agency, Body Awareness, Virtual Humans

Research Background and Issues

• Identified Problems or Challenges:

  • Virtual reality technology can replace an individual's physical body and interact with virtual self-representations (virtual bodies/avatars), but its impact on the perception of internal bodily signals (body awareness) remains unclear.
  • Research on the effects of virtual avatars and mirrors on body awareness is limited, especially regarding their potential risks in therapeutic applications.

• Significance:

  • Body awareness is a crucial component of self-perception, influencing mental and physical health, including the management of chronic conditions (e.g., chronic pain, eating disorders, anxiety, and depression).
  • As VR technology is applied across various fields, its potential impact on body awareness could present both opportunities and risks.

• Research Motivation and Related Work:

  • Related studies suggest that the sense of embodiment (SoE) of virtual or artificial body parts may influence body awareness through multisensory stimulation.
  • However, whether virtual avatar embodiment systematically impacts body awareness remains unclear, particularly regarding the role of mirror exposure in eliciting embodiment and its effects on body awareness.

Proposed Solution

• Methods and Solutions:

  • Propose VR experiments to explore the impact of virtual avatars on body awareness and the moderating role of mirror exposure on body perception.
  • Design a 2×2 mixed experiment with real-world and VR environments and mirror/no-mirror conditions to compare changes in body awareness.
  • Research variables include self-reported body awareness, sense of embodiment (SoE), and interoceptive accuracy (IAC) measured via a heartbeat counting task.

• Innovative Aspects:

  • Utilize highly personalized, realistic virtual body representations and fully replicate the laboratory environment to minimize experimental interference from external environmental differences.
  • Introduce mirror and non-mirror conditions to investigate the impact of third-person visual perspectives on embodiment and body awareness.

• Implementation Steps and Techniques:

  • Generate highly realistic virtual avatars of participants using photography and modeling techniques.
  • Construct immersive virtual environments using VR hardware (e.g., HTC Vive Pro) and Unity.
  • Design body awareness tasks, including actions such as "squatting," "rotating," "waving," and "pushing," to measure participants' body awareness performance in VR and real-world environments.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Findings:

  • Virtual avatars in virtual environments resulted in lower embodiment (particularly body ownership and sense of agency), with participants focusing more on the visual appearance of their bodies rather than internal bodily signals (e.g., interoception and attention regulation).
  • Instrument-measured interoceptive accuracy (IAC) was not significantly affected by the virtual environment, indicating that only self-reported body awareness was impacted during the experience.
  • Mirrors did not significantly enhance the embodiment of virtual avatars but instead encouraged participants to focus further on the visual signals of their body appearance.

• Advantages and Contributions:

  • The experiment demonstrated that embodiment partially mediates the impact of virtual environments on body awareness, with "body transformation" perception significantly associated with changes in body awareness in virtual environments.
  • Provides warnings for VR scene design, suggesting potential interference with body awareness and proposing design strategies such as reducing mirror exposure time.

• Limitations and Future Directions:

  • Limitations: The experiment focused on realistic virtual environments and highly personalized virtual bodies, which may limit the generalizability of the results. The relatively small sample size may have led to some effects not reaching significance.
  • Future Directions:
    1. Explore the impact of different virtual body designs (e.g., non-personalized or generic avatars) on body awareness.
    2. Conduct further experiments on how non-body-awareness tasks or different virtual scenarios affect body awareness.
    3. Improve VR hardware tracking accuracy and optimize the application of mirror exposure.