Model the probability of users noticing the movement inconsistency between avatars and users.

What is it about?

We explored arm movement inconsistency as it is one most agile and frequently-used body parts. Since movement can be dissected into a series of poses, we start by investigating pose inconsistency, which can be implemented by applying angular offsets to the arm joints. Instead of directly modeling the effects of inconsistency on the sense of body ownership, we decide to first investigate on our first research question RQ1: how strength of arm movement inconsistency affect the probability of it being noticed. We then hope to leverage this knowledge to provide guidelines on the applicable range of movement inconsistency that be highly useful in supporting applications with various levels of the sense of body ownership requirements. This, therefore, raises our second research question RQ2: how to leverage applicable inconsistency in building interaction techniques with different body ownership requirements?

Featured Image

Photo by Beth Macdonald on Unsplash

Photo by Beth Macdonald on Unsplash

Why is it important?

An avatar mirroring the user’s movement is commonly adopted in Virtual Reality(VR). Maintaining the user-avatar movement consistency provides the user a sense of body ownership and thus an immersive experience. However, breaking this consistency can enable new interaction functionalities, such as pseudo haptic feedback or input augmentation, at the expense of immersion. We propose to quantify the probability of users noticing the movement inconsistency while the inconsistency amplitude is being enlarged, which aims to guide the intervention of the users’ sense of body ownership in VR.