The Body Scaling Effect and Its Impact on Physics Plausibility
Matti Pouke, Evan G. Center, Alexis P. Chambers, Sakaria Pouke, Timo, Ojala, Steven M. LaValle

TL;DR
This study explores how body ownership illusions in VR influence perceptions of physics plausibility, revealing that perceived realism of movie physics increases under body scaling illusions, with implications for virtual environment design.
Contribution
It demonstrates that body ownership illusions can alter physics plausibility perceptions in VR, highlighting the impact of body scaling on realism judgments.
Findings
Movie physics appeared more realistic under body ownership illusion.
Participants underestimated object sizes during synchronous conditions.
The hypothesis that true physics would seem more realistic in asynchronous conditions was unsupported.
Abstract
In this study we investigated the effect of body ownership illusion-based body scaling on physics plausibility in Virtual Reality (VR). Our interest was in examining whether body ownership illusion-based body scaling could affect the plausibility of rigid body dynamics similarly to altering VR users' scale by manipulating their virtual interpupillary distance and viewpoint height. The procedure involved the conceptual replication of two previous studies. We investigated physics plausibility with 40 participants under two conditions. In our synchronous condition, we used visuo-tactile stimuli to elicit a body ownership illusion of inhabiting an invisible doll-sized body on participants reclining on an exam table. Our asynchronous condition was otherwise similar, but the visuo-tactile stimuli were provided asynchronously to prevent the onset of the body ownership illusion. We were…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
