Boban Loen, Boulic Ronan, Herbelin Bruno
IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph. 2025 May;31(5):3077-3086. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2025.3549123. Epub 2025 Apr 25.
The perception of one's own body is subject to systematic distortions and can be influenced by exposure to visual stimuli showing distorted bodies. In Virtual Reality (VR), echoing such body judgment inaccuracies, avatars with strong appearance dissimilarities with respect to users' bodies can be successfully embodied. The present experimental work investigates, in the healthy population, the perception of the own body in immersive and embodied VR, as well as the impact of being co-present with virtual humans on such self-perception. Participants were successively presented with different avatars, corresponding to various upper- and lower-body proportions, and were asked to compare them with their perceived own body morphology. To investigate the influence of co-present virtual humans on this judgment, the task was performed in co-presence with virtual agents corresponding to various body appearances. Results show an overall overestimation of one's leg length and no influence of the co-present agent's appearance. Importantly, the embodiment scores reflect such body morphology judgment inaccuracy, with participants reporting lower levels of embodiment for avatars with very short legs than for avatars with very long legs. Our findings suggest specifics of embodied body judgment methods, likely resulting from the experience of embodying the avatar as compared to visual appreciation only.
对自身身体的感知会受到系统性扭曲，并且会受到展示扭曲身体的视觉刺激的影响。在虚拟现实（VR）中，与这种身体判断不准确情况相呼应的是，与用户身体外观差异很大的虚拟形象能够被成功具身化。本实验研究在健康人群中，沉浸式具身VR环境下对自身身体的感知，以及与虚拟人共处对这种自我感知的影响。参与者依次看到对应不同上下身比例的不同虚拟形象，并被要求将它们与自己感知到的身体形态进行比较。为了研究共处的虚拟人对这一判断的影响，该任务是在与对应不同身体外观的虚拟代理共处的情况下进行的。结果显示，人们总体上高估了自己的腿长，并且共处代理的外观没有影响。重要的是，具身化得分反映了这种身体形态判断的不准确，参与者报告称，与腿非常长的虚拟形象相比，腿非常短的虚拟形象的具身化程度较低。我们的研究结果表明了具身化身体判断方法的特点，这可能是由于与仅通过视觉欣赏相比，具身化虚拟形象的体验所致。
