Agency and Body Ownership in Immersive Virtual Reality Environments: A Laboratory Study

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) technologies such as head-mounted displays are gaining increasing attention since the Oculus Rift development kit entered the market in 2016. VR is assumed to offer great potential for different purposes such as entertainment, gaming, education, or healthcare. Briefly summarized, VR provides an enclosed virtual environment in which users can become immersed, can move and look freely at 360-degree in any direction, and they can interact, manipulate, or create virtual objects with their entire body. With regard to these properties and the characteristic of immersion (a user’s state of deep involvement with an IT) we examine how immersion can be enhanced by the theoretical constructs of agency and body ownership in a VR space. Therefore, we conduct a laboratory study to enhance the perception of being in voluntary control of actions (agency) and the sense of the virtual body as one’s own one (body ownership) with 69 participants.