Presence and Embodiment in Augmented Reality

Abstract

Today's world is filled with mediated environments, and a lot of these have become increasingly immersive. Some even allow us to replace or augment the visual representations of our own bodies. This provides us with a completely new viewpoint and begs the question how do we experience our self in such environments? Two very relevant concepts to how we experience our self in immersive mediated environments are the concepts of Self-presence and the Sense of Embodiment (SoE). A lot of research on these concepts has been done in Virtual Reality, however, the same can not be said for Augmented Reality (AR). This is due to the fact that these concepts are often ignored in AR because they are considered inherent to the visual presence of the real body. This logic is flawed, as scenarios exist in which both the real body and a virtual self-representation are visually present. In this study, we investigated the possible levels of Self-presence and the SoE in such an AR scenario, alternating the virtual body's movement congruency and anthropomorphism. We also investigated the relationship between Self-presence and the SoE, to provide empirical proof that a relation between the two exists. In particular, we focused on the relation between Self-presence and body ownership, a sub-class of the SoE, because this relation has been speculated upon often in literature. To investigate these concepts we implemented an AR environment using two different system designs. The first system made use of a commercial optical see-through display, but this system was deemed unsuitable for this study after preliminary testing. For the second system, a custom video see-through AR Head-Mounted Display was designed and built, to avoid the limitations of the first system. This second system was deemed suitable and used in the experiment. The results of our experiment show that the SoE was induced to a certain extent for the disconnected avatar using congruent avatar movements, irrespective of avatar anthropomorphism. We can also argue that our results indicate some measure of Self-presence for the disconnected avatar occurred in the congruent movement cases, partially based on anecdotal evidence. Furthermore, our results show a strong correlation between subjective body ownership and Self-presence, which empirically proves the existence of a relationship between both concepts. These results demonstrate that both Self-presence and the SoE are difficult but viable concepts in AR, and definitely merit further research.