Development and validation of an experimental environment for body ownership research in the virtual-reality social network service VRChat

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed significant restrictions on experiments such as those using motion capture suits in the laboratory. On the other hand, the number of users of virtual reality (VR) social network services has been increasing due to the pandemic. Thus, we constructed a laboratory in VRChat, one of the VR social network services, where full-body ownership experiments can be conducted, and validated it. The subjects entered the experimental world in VRChat, changed into the experimental avatar, and participated in the experiment. The subject’s movements and the avatar were synchronized or asynchronized with 1-s delay. After 5-min ball reaching using the avatar, subjective evaluations were made regarding senses of body ownership, agency, and pseudo-haptics. In the synchronous condition, we obtained a stronger sense of body ownership, agency, and pseudo-haptic sensation than in the asynchronous condition, reproducing the results of previous studies. These results suggest that the laboratory in the public VR social network enables us to manipulate experimental conditions, and perform experiments on full-body illusion.