Investigating How Motion Velocity Impact Virtual Body Weight Perception in VR

This call for a thesis or project is open for the following modules:
If you are interested, please get in touch with the primary contact person listed below.

Virtual reality (VR) allows us to embody other identities using virtual humans, known as avatars. The appearance of these avatars can significantly influence the behavior of users in a virtual environment, known as Proteus Effect (Yee and Bailenson, 2007). Studies show that in this way, not only do users’ behaviors adapt to the avatar’s appearance, but even their internal body image can adapt to the altered virtual body weight if users felt embodied in the avatar (Turbyne et al., 2021). Can the feeling of altered body weight be further enhanced if one’s virtual body not only changes in visible body volume, but it also feels heavier?

Goal

Our goal is to find out whether a slowed down movement of the virtual body’s limbs can enhance the effect of embodying a heavier avatar and vice versa. For this purpose, we want to manipulate the motion velocity of the users’ virtual body and adapt it to the (virtual) body weight of the avatar.

Tasks

The topic will focus on the following tasks:

Research of relevant preliminary work
Implementation of an avatar motion velocity in VR that is dependent on the body weight of the virtual human
Elaboration of a study design to test the effect of the manipulation of the motion velocity on the body weight perception
Study conduction
Evaluation and presentation of results

Prerequisits

Experience with Unity game engine
Interest in combining technical development with empirical work
Basic knowledge of research methods and statistics

Literature

Turbyne, C., Goedhart, A., de Koning, P., Schirmbeck, F., and Denys, D. (2021). Systematic review and meta-analysis of virtual reality in mental healthcare: Effects of full body illusions on body image disturbance. Frontiers in Virtual Reality 2, 39. doi:10.3389/frvir.2021.657638
Yee, N. and Bailenson, J. (2007). The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behavior. Human Communication Research 33, 271–290. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2958.2007.00299.x. Publisher: Oxford Academic

Contact Persons at the University Würzburg