Positive narrativity enhances sense of agency toward a VR avatar
Kureha Hamagashira, Miyuki Azuma, Sotaro Shimada

TL;DR
A positive story about a VR avatar increases users' sense of control over it, enhancing the illusion of owning the avatar's body.
Contribution
This study shows that narrative context can modulate embodiment in VR by influencing users' sense of agency.
Findings
Positive narratives significantly enhanced participants' sense of agency toward the VR avatar.
Sense of agency was positively correlated with perceived personal familiarity with the avatar.
Avatar narrativity modulates embodiment experiences in virtual reality.
Abstract
The full-body illusion (FBI) refers to the experience of perceiving a virtual avatar as one’s own body. In virtual reality (VR) environments, inducing the FBI has been shown to modulate users’ bodily experiences and behavior. Previous studies have demonstrated that embodying avatars with specific characteristics can influence users’ actions, largely through the activation of implicit stereotypes. However, few studies have explicitly manipulated users’ impressions of an avatar by introducing narrative context. The present study investigated how avatar narrativity, induced through contextual narratives, affects the FBI. Healthy participants embodied a powerful artificial lifeform avatar in VR after listening to either a positive narrative, in which the avatar used its abilities to protect others, or a negative narrative, in which it misused its power. Participants’ impressions of the…
Genes, proteins, chemicals, diseases, species, mutations and cell lines named across the full text — each resolved to its canonical identifier and authoritative record.
Click any figure to enlarge with its caption.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4Peer 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.
Taxonomy
TopicsVirtual Reality Applications and Impacts · Action Observation and Synchronization · Free Will and Agency
