Abstract
The aim of this study was to gain better insight into the effects of high and low avatar- owner resemblance on spatial presence, engagement, naturalness and negative effects regarding the user experience in an immersive virtual environment. Participants, between 18 and 32 years old, needed to walk on a 60 m high broken pathway in either a condition in which the shoes in VR matched the shoes they were wearing in reality (high resemblance condition) or not (seeing only generic shoes in a low resemblance condition). The results showed no differences between the conditions, despite that participants within the high avatar- owner resemblance perceived a higher similarity between themselves and their digitally displayed shoes and all liked to customize their shoes in VR. This results indicates that it is not a requirement to develop high avatar-owner resemblance in highly immersive virtual environments in which extreme situations are presented which trigger psychological arousal such as stress.
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Acknowledgements
For the creation of the VR world we would like to thank the students at the game department at Breda University of Applied Sciences and the R&D department Cradle (especially for the artwork and programming of the interactive shoes).
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van Gisbergen, M.S., Sensagir, I., Relouw, J. (2020). How Real Do You See Yourself in VR? The Effect of User-Avatar Resemblance on Virtual Reality Experiences and Behaviour. In: Jung, T., tom Dieck, M.C., Rauschnabel, P.A. (eds) Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. Progress in IS. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37869-1_32
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