Effects of Different Levels of Self-Representation on Spatial Awareness, Self-Presence and Spatial Presence during Virtual Locomotion

TL;DR

This study investigates how different levels of self-representation in virtual environments affect users' spatial awareness, self-presence, and spatial presence during virtual locomotion, highlighting the importance of full-body avatars for enhanced experience.

Contribution

The paper introduces a virtual locomotion system with three levels of avatar representation and demonstrates that full-body avatars significantly improve user experience in virtual locomotion.

Findings

Full-body representation enhances spatial awareness, self-presence, and spatial presence.

Lower-body representation outperforms viewpoint-only representation.

Full-body avatars are crucial for better virtual locomotion experiences.

Abstract

Recently, there has been growing interest in investigating the effects of self-representation on user experience and perception in virtual environments. However, few studies investigated the effects of levels of body representation (full-body, lower-body and viewpoint) on locomotion experience in terms of spatial awareness, self-presence and spatial presence during virtual locomotion. Understanding such effects is essential for building new virtual locomotion systems with better locomotion experience. In the present study, we first built a walking-in-place (WIP) virtual locomotion system that can represent users using avatars at three levels (full-body, lower-body and viewpoint) and is capable of rendering walking animations during in-place walking of a user. We then conducted a virtual locomotion experiment using three levels of representation to investigate the effects of body representation on spatial awareness, self-presence and spatial presence during virtual locomotion. Experimental results showed that the full-body representation provided better virtual locomotion experience in these three factors compared to that of the lower-body representation and the viewpoint representation. The lower-body representation also provided better experience than the viewpoint representation. These results suggest that self-representation of users in virtual environments using a full-body avatar is critical for providing better locomotion experience. Using full-body avatars for self-representation of users should be considered when building new virtual locomotion systems and applications.