Haptic feedback in a virtual crowd scenario improves the emotional response

Research has shown that incorporating haptics into virtual environments can increase sensory fidelity and provide powerful and immersive experiences. However, current studies on haptics in virtual interactions primarily focus on one-on-one scenarios, while kinesthetic haptic interactions in large virtual gatherings are underexplored. This study aims to investigate the impact of kinesthetic haptics on eliciting emotional responses within crowded virtual reality (VR) scenarios. Specifically, we examine the influence of type or quality of the haptic feedback on the perception of positive and negative emotions. We designed and developed different combinations of tactile and torque feedback devices and evaluated their effects on emotional responses. To achieve this, we explored different combinations of haptic feedback devices, including “No Haptic,” “Tactile Stimulus” delivering tactile cues, and “Haptic Stimulus” delivering tactile and torque cues, in combination with two immersive 360-degree video crowd scenarios, namely, “Casual Crowd” and “Aggressive Crowd.” The results suggest that varying the type or quality of haptic feedback can evoke different emotional responses in crowded VR scenarios. Participants reported increased levels of nervousness with Haptic Stimulus in both virtual scenarios, while both Tactile Stimulus and Haptic Stimulus were negatively associated with pleasantness and comfort during the interaction. Additionally, we observed that participants’ sense of touch being real was enhanced in Haptic Stimulus compared to Tactile Stimulus. The “Haptic Stimulus” condition had the most positive influence on participants’ sense of identification with the crowd

Illusory ownership of a virtual child body causes overestimation of object sizes and implicit attitude changes

An illusory sensation of ownership over a surrogate limb or whole body can be induced through specific forms of multisensory stimulation, such as synchronous visuotactile tapping on the hidden real and visible rubber hand in the rubber hand illusion. Such methods have been used to induce ownership over a manikin and a virtual body that substitute the real body, as seen from firstperson perspective, through a head-mounted display. However, the perceptual and behavioral consequences of such transformed body ownership have hardly been explored. In Exp. 1, immersive virtual reality was used to embody 30 adults as a 4-y-old child (condition C), and as an adult body scaled to the same height as the child (condition A), experienced from the first-person perspective, and with virtual and real body movements synchronized. The result was a strong body-ownership illusion equally for C and A. Moreover there was an overestimation of the sizes of objects compared with a nonembodied baseline, which was significantly greater for C compared with A. An implicit association test showed that C resulted in significantly faster reaction times for the classification of self with child-like compared with adult-like attributes. Exp. 2 with an additional 16 participants extinguished the ownership illusion by using visuomotor asynchrony, with all else equal. The size-estimation and implicit association test differences between C and A were also extinguished. We conclude that there are perceptual and probably behavioral correlates of bodyownership illusions that occur as a function of the type of body in which embodiment occurs

Virtual Embodiment of White People in a Black Virtual Body Leads to a Sustained Reduction in Their Implicit Racial Bias

Virtual reality can be used to visually substitute a person’s body by a life-sized virtual one. Such embodiment results in a perceptual illusion of body ownership over the virtual body (VB). Previous research has shown that the form of the VB can influence implicit attitudes. In particular, embodying White people in a Black virtual body is associated with an immediate decrease in their implicit racial bias against Black people. We tested whether the reduction in implicit bias lasts for at least 1 week and whether it is enhanced by multiple exposures. Two experiments were carried out with a total of 90 female participants where the virtual body was either Black or White. Participants were required to follow a virtual Tai Chi teacher who was either Asian or European Caucasian. Each participant had 1, 2, or 3 exposures separated by days. Implicit racial bias was measured 1 week before their first exposure and 1 week after their last. The results show that implicit bias decreased more for those with the Black virtual body than the White. There was also some evidence of a general decrease in bias independently of body type for which possible explanations are put forward

Reducing risk and improving maternal perspective-taking and empathy using virtual embodiment

The ability to perspective-take (cognitive awareness of another's state) and empathise (emotional/affective response) are important characteristics for sensitive, co-operative and constructive parenting, which assists in developing adaptive functioning for children. For the first time, immersive virtual reality was used to place parents in the position of a child in order to assess impact on perspective-taking and empathy. This novel study was conducted with 20 non-high risk Spanish mothers (a pilot study with 12 mothers is reported in supplementary files). Mothers were virtually embodied as a 4-year-old child, experienced from the first-person perspective and with virtual and real body movements synchronised. They interacted with a 'mother avatar', which responded either in a Positive or Negative way. Participants reported a strong body ownership illusion for the child body that led to cognitive, emotional and physical reactions. Experiencing negative maternal behavior increased levels of empathy. In addition, the Negative mother led to increased feelings of fear of violence. Physiological data indicated greater stress in the Negative than Positive condition. Although further research is required to assess the effectiveness of such methods, any improvement in empathy that leads to a change in parenting behavior has the potential to impact on developmental outcomes for children

Using virtual reality to assess gesture performance deficits in schizophrenia patients

Introduction: Gesture performance deficits are prevalent in schizophrenia patients and are strongly associated with poor social communication skills and community functioning, affecting their overall quality of life. Currently, video-recording technology is widely used in clinical settings to assess gesture production deficits in schizophrenia patients. Nevertheless, the subjective evaluation of video-recordings can encumber task assessment. The present study will aim to use virtual reality to examine its potential use as an alternative tool to objectively measure gesture performance accuracy in schizophrenia patients and healthy controls. Methods: Gesture performance in the virtual reality setting will be based on the well-established Test of Upper Limb Apraxia. Participants will be immersed in a virtual environment where they will experience themselves being embodied in a collocated virtual body seen from a first-person perspective. Motion trackers will be placed on participants’ hands and elbows to track upper body movements in real-time, and to record gesturemovement for later analysis. Participants will see a virtual agent sitting across fromthem, with a virtual table in between. The agent will performvarious types of gestures and the participants’ task will be to imitate those gestures as accurately as possible. Measurements from the tracking devices will be stored and analyzed to address gesture performance accuracy across groups. Discussion: This study aims to provide objective measurements of gesture performance accuracy in schizophrenia patients. If successful, the results will provide new knowledge to the gesture literature and offer the potential for novel therapeutic interventions using virtual reality technologies. Such interventions can improve gesturing and thus advance social communication skills in schizophrenia patients

A mechanistic account of bodily resonance and implicit bias

Implicit social biases play a critical role in shaping our attitudes towards other people. Such biases are thought to arise, in part, from a comparison between features of one's own self-image and those of another agent, a process known as 'bodily resonance'. Recent data have demonstrated that implicit bias can be remarkably plastic, being modulated by brief immersive virtual reality experiences that place participants in a virtual body with features of an out-group member. Here, we provide a mechanistic account of bodily resonance and implicit bias in terms of a putative self-image network that encodes associations between different features of an agent. When subsequently perceiving another agent, the output of this self-image network is proportional to the overlap between their respective features, providing an index of bodily resonance. By combining the self-image network with a drift diffusion model of decision making, we simulate performance on the implicit association test (IAT) and show that the model captures the ubiquitous implicit bias towards in-group members. We subsequently demonstrate that this implicit bias can be modulated by a simulated illusory body ownership experience, consistent with empirical data; and that the magnitude and plasticity of implicit bias correlates with self-esteem. Hence, we provide a simple mechanistic account of bodily resonance and implicit bias which could contribute to the development of interventions for reducing the negative evaluation of social out-groups

Evaluating participant responses to a virtual reality experience using reinforcement learning

Virtual reality applications depend on multiple factors, for example, quality of rendering, responsiveness, and interfaces. In order to evaluate the relative contributions of different factors to quality of experience, post-exposure questionnaires are typically used. Questionnaires are problematic as the questions can frame how participants think about their experience and cannot easily take account of non-additivity among the various factors. Traditional experimental design can incorporate non-additivity but with a large factorial design table beyond two factors. Here, we extend a previous method by introducing a reinforcement learning (RL) agent that proposes possible changes to factor levels during the exposure and requires the participant to either accept these or not. Eventually, the RL converges on a policy where no further proposed changes are accepted. An experiment was carried out with 20 participants where four binary factors were considered. A consistent configuration of factors emerged where participants preferred to use a teleportation technique for navigation (compared to walking-in-place), a full-body representation (rather than hands only), the responsiveness of virtual human characters (compared to being ignored) and realistic compared to cartoon rendering. We propose this new method to evaluate participant choices and discuss various extensions.This research is supported by the European Research Council Advanced grant Moments in Time in Immersive Virtual Environments (MoTIVE) grant no. 742989 and all authors were funded by this grant except for G.S. who is supported by ‘la Caixa’ Foundation (ID 100010434) with Fellowship code no. LCF/BQ/DR19/11740007.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A separate reality : An update on place Illusion and plausibility in virtual reality

We review the concept of presence in virtual reality, normally thought of as the sense of “being there” in the virtual world. We argued in a 2009 paper that presence consists of two orthogonal illusions that we refer to as Place Illusion (PI, the illusion of being in the place depicted by the VR) and Plausibility (Psi, the illusion that the virtual situations and events are really happening). Both are with the proviso that the participant in the virtual reality knows for sure that these are illusions. Presence (PI and Psi) together with the illusion of ownership over the virtual body that self-represents the participant, are the three key illusions of virtual reality. Copresence, togetherness with others in the virtual world, can be a consequence in the context of interaction between remotely located participants in the same shared virtual environments, or between participants and virtual humans. We then review several different methods of measuring presence: questionnaires, physiological and behavioural measures, breaks in presence, and a psychophysics method based on transitions between different system configurations. Presence is not the only way to assess the responses of people to virtual reality experiences, and we present methods that rely solely on participant preferences, including the use of sentiment analysis that allows participants to express their experience in their own words rather than be required to adopt the terminology and concepts of researchers. We discuss several open questions and controversies that exist in this field, providing an update to the 2009 paper, in particular with respect to models of Plausibility. We argue that Plausibility is the most interesting and complex illusion to understand and is worthy of significant more research. Regarding measurement we conclude that the ideal method would be a combination of a psychophysical method and qualitative methods including sentiment analysis.Postprint (published version

The sentiment of a virtual rock concert

We created a virtual reality version of a 1983 performance by Dire Straits, this being a highly complex scenario consisting of both the virtual band performance and the appearance and behaviour of the virtual audience surrounding the participants. Our goal was to understand the responses of participants, and to learn how this type of scenario might be improved for later reconstructions of other concerts. To understand the responses of participants we carried out two studies which used senti- ment analysis of texts written by the participants. Study 1 (n = 25) (Beacco et al. in IEEE Virtual Reality: 538–545, 2021) had the unexpected finding that negative sentiment was caused by the virtual audience, where e.g. some participants were fearful of being harassed by audience members. In Study 2 (n = 26) notwithstanding some changes, the audience again led to negative sentiment—e.g. a feeling of being stared at. For Study 2 we compared sentiment with questionnaire scores, finding that the illusion of being at the concert was associated with positive sentiment for males but negative for females. Overall, we found sentiment was dominated by responses to the audience rather than the band. Participants had been placed in an unusual situation, being alone at a concert, surrounded by strangers, who seemed to pose a social threat for some of them. We relate our findings to the concept of Plausibility, the illusion that events and situations in the VR are really happening. The results indicate high Plausibility, since the negative sentiment, for example in response to being started at, only makes sense if the events are experienced as actually happening. We conclude with the need for co-design of VR scenarios, and the use of sentiment analysis in this process, rather than sole reliance on concepts proposed by researchers, typically expressed through questionnaires, which may not reflect the experiences of participants.Postprint (published version

Self-observation of a virtual body-double engaged in social interaction reduces persecutory thoughts

The proportion of the population who experience persecutory thoughts is 10–15%. People then engage in safety-seeking behaviours, typically avoiding social interactions, which prevents disconfirmatory experiences and hence paranoia persists. Here we show that persecutory thoughts can be reduced if prior to engaging in social interaction in VR participants first see their virtual body-double doing so. Thirty non-clinical participants were recruited to take part in a study, where they were embodied in a virtual body that closely resembled themselves, and asked to interact with members of a crowd. In the Random condition (n = 15) they observed their body-double wandering around but not engaging with the crowd. In the Targeted condition the body-double correctly interacted with members of the crowd. The Green Paranoid Thoughts Scale was measured 1 week before and 1 week after the exposure and decreased only for those in the Targeted condition. The results suggest that the observation of the body-double correctly carrying out a social interaction task in VR may lead to anxiety-reducing mental rehearsal for interaction thus overcoming safety behaviours. The results also extend knowledge of the effects of vicarious agency, suggesting that identification with the actions of body-double can influence subsequent psychological state