Petting a cat helps you incarnate the avatar: Influence of the emotions over embodiment in VR
Benjamin Freeling, Flavien Lécuyer, Antonio Capobianco · 2022
Thanks to its strong capacity to immerse users in virtual worlds, virtual reality can elicit various emotions with diverse environments. This aspect of virtual reality makes it an interesting and powerful tool in many fields, such as entertainment with scenarios based on a strong emotional implication, training in particular for social or communication skills, or even medical therapy with phobia or addiction treatment. However, in virtual reality the participant lives the experience through an avatar, and feels the emotion according to what happens to this avatar.This paper discusses the link between embodiment and emotional implication in virtual reality. In particular, we looked at how emotions and the sense of embodiment are correlated in virtual reality. Through an experiment, we demonstrate that the sense of embodiment is strongly correlated with the emotional experience of the virtual environment. The sense of embodiment is increased when the virtual scenarios make the participants feel strong emotions, whether those emotions are positive or negative. We also show that emotions mainly affect two sub-components of embodiment: the appearance and response sub-scales.