# The Illusion of Animal Body Ownership and Its Potential for Virtual Reality Games

## TL;DR

This paper explores virtual animal embodiment in VR, demonstrating that nonhumanoid avatars can evoke body ownership and may surpass humanoid avatars in certain contexts, with implications for education and entertainment.

## Contribution

It introduces methods for controlling virtual animals and shows that virtual body ownership extends beyond humanoids, challenging existing assumptions and broadening VR applications.

## Key findings

- Virtual body ownership applies to nonhumanoids.
- In some cases, animal avatars outperform human-like avatars.
- People show strong interest in animal embodiment experiences.

## Abstract

Virtual reality offers the unique possibility to experience a virtual representation as our own body. In contrast to previous research that predominantly studied this phenomenon for humanoid avatars, our work focuses on virtual animals. In this paper, we discuss different body tracking approaches to control creatures such as spiders or bats and the respective virtual body ownership effects. Our empirical results demonstrate that virtual body ownership is also applicable for nonhumanoids and can even outperform human-like avatars in certain cases. An additional survey confirms the general interest of people in creating such experiences and allows us to initiate a broad discussion regarding the applicability of animal embodiment for educational and entertainment purposes.