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Effect of Avatar Appearance on Detection Thresholds for Remapped Hand Movements

Hand interaction techniques in virtual reality often exploit visual dominance over proprioception to remap physical hand movements onto different virtual movements. However, when the offset between virtual and physical hands increases, the remapped virtual hand movements are hardly self-attributed, and the users become aware of the remapping. Interestingly, the sense of self-attribution of a body is called the sense of body ownership (SoBO) in the field of psychology, and the realistic the avatar, the stronger is the SoBO. Hence, we hypothesized that realistic avatars (i.e., human hands) can foster self-attribution of the remapped movements better than abstract avatars (i.e., spherical pointers), thus making the remapping less noticeable. In this article, we present an experiment in which participants repeatedly executed reaching movements with their right hand while different amounts of horizontal shifts were applied. We measured the remapping detection thresholds for each combination of shift directions (left or right) and avatar appearances (realistic or abstract). The results show that realistic avatars increased the detection threshold (i.e., lowered sensitivity) by 31.3 percent than the abstract avatars when the leftward shift was applied (i.e., when the hand moved in the direction away from the body-midline). In addition, the proprioceptive drift (i.e., the displacement of self-localization toward an avatar) was larger with realistic avatars for leftward shifts, indicating that visual information was given greater preference during visuo-proprioceptive integration in realistic avatars. Our findings quantifiably show that realistic avatars can make remapping less noticeable for larger mismatches between virtual and physical movements and can potentially improve a wide variety of hand-remapping techniques without changing the mapping itself.