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First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality

Slater, M; Spanlang, B; Sanchez-Vives, MV; Blanke, O; (2010) First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality. PLOS ONE , 5 (5) , Article e10564. 10.1371/journal.pone.0010564. Green open access

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Abstract

Background: Altering the normal association between touch and its visual correlate can result in the illusory perception of a fake limb as part of our own body. Thus, when touch is seen to be applied to a rubber hand while felt synchronously on the corresponding hidden real hand, an illusion of ownership of the rubber hand usually occurs. The illusion has also been demonstrated using visuomotor correlation between the movements of the hidden real hand and the seen fake hand. This type of paradigm has been used with respect to the whole body generating out-of-the-body and body substitution illusions. However, such studies have only ever manipulated a single factor and although they used a form of virtual reality have not exploited the power of immersive virtual reality (IVR) to produce radical transformations in body ownership.Principal Findings: Here we show that a first person perspective of a life-sized virtual human female body that appears to substitute the male subjects' own bodies was sufficient to generate a body transfer illusion. This was demonstrated subjectively by questionnaire and physiologically through heart-rate deceleration in response to a threat to the virtual body. This finding is in contrast to earlier experimental studies that assume visuotactile synchrony to be the critical contributory factor in ownership illusions. Our finding was possible because IVR allowed us to use a novel experimental design for this type of problem with three independent binary factors: (i) perspective position (first or third), (ii) synchronous or asynchronous mirror reflections and (iii) synchrony or asynchrony between felt and seen touch.Conclusions: The results support the notion that bottom-up perceptual mechanisms can temporarily override top down knowledge resulting in a radical illusion of transfer of body ownership. The research also illustrates immersive virtual reality as a powerful tool in the study of body representation and experience, since it supports experimental manipulations that would otherwise be infeasible, with the technology being mature enough to represent human bodies and their motion.

Type: Article
Title: First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010564
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010564
Language: English
Additional information: © 2010 Slater et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This research was supported by the Integrated Project PRESENCCIA funded under the European Union's Sixth Framework Program, Future and Emerging Technologies (FET), Contract Number 27731. http://cordis.europa.eu/ist/fet/pr.htm. The work was also partially supported by MS's European Research Council grant TRAVERSE (227985). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Keywords: PERCEPTUAL ILLUSION, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, RUBBER HAND, LIMB, SUM, REPRESENTATIONS, RECOGNITION, OWNERSHIP, ONLINE, TOUCH
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/84873
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