The Effects of Avatars on Presence in Virtual Environments for Persons with Mobility Impairments

Guo, Rongkai; Samaraweera, Gayani; Quarles, John

The Effects of Avatars on Presence in Virtual Environments for Persons with Mobility Impairments

Files

001-008.pdf (550.12 KB)

Date

2014

Authors

Guo, Rongkai
Samaraweera, Gayani
Quarles, John

Publisher

The Eurographics Association

Abstract

The main question we ask is: How do avatars affect presence specifically for Persons with Mobility Impairments (PMIs)? For example, PMIs' deficits in the proprioceptive sense could affect their body perception in immersive virtual reality, which could impact presence. To investigate this we replicated the classic virtual pit experiment and included a responsive full body avatar (or lack thereof) as a 3D user interface. We recruited from two different populations: 11 PMIs and another 11 Persons without Mobility Impairments (PNMIs) as a control. Each PNMI was matched to a PMI based on age, weight, height, and prior VE exposure. Results of this study indicate that avatars elicit a higher sense of presence for PMIs than for PNMIs. In addition, results suggest that PMIs are easier to immerse in VEs than PNMIs, which may further motivate the future use of VE technology for PMIs.

        @inproceedings{:10.2312/ve.20141357
https::/diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/ve.20141357.001-008
,
booktitle = {ICAT-EGVE 2014 - International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence and Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments
},
editor = {Takuya Nojima and Dirk Reiners and Oliver Staadt
},
title = {{The Effects of Avatars on Presence in Virtual Environments for Persons with Mobility Impairments
}},
author = {Guo, Rongkai and 
Samaraweera, Gayani and 
Quarles, John
},
year = {2014
},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association
},
ISSN = {1727-530X
},
ISBN = {978-3-905674-65-1
},
DOI = {/10.2312/ve.20141357
https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/ve.20141357.001-008
}
}