Investigating the Physiological Effects of Self-Embodiment in Stressful Virtual Environments

In this paper we explore the benefits that self-embodied virtual avatars provide to a user’s sense of presence while wearing a headmounted display in a immersive virtual environment (IVE). Recent work has shown that providing a user with a virtual avatar can increase their performance when completing tasks such as ego-centric distance judgment [5]. The results of this research imply that a heightened sense of presence is responsible for the improvement. However, there is an ambiguity in interpreting the results. Are users merely gaining additional scaling information of their environment by using the representation of their body as a metric, or is the virtual avatar heightening their sense of presence and increasing their accuracy? To investigate this question, we conducted a betweensubjects design experiment to analyze any physiological differences between users given virtual avatars versus ones that were not. If the virtual avatars are increasing a user’s sense of presence, their physiological data should indicate a higher level of stress when presented with a stressful environment.