Beyond Human: Animals as an Escape from Stereotype Avatars in Virtual Reality Games
Abstract
Virtual reality setups are particularly suited to create a tight bond between players and their avatars up to a degree where we start perceiving the virtual representation as our own body. We hypothesize that such an illusion of virtual body ownership (IVBO) has a particularly high, yet overlooked potential for nonhumanoid avatars. To validate our claim, we use the example of three very different creatures---a scorpion, a rhino, and a bird---to explore possible avatar controls and game mechanics based on specific animal abilities. A quantitative evaluation underpins the high game enjoyment arising from embodying such nonhuman morphologies, including additional body parts and obtaining respective superhuman skills, which allows us to derive a set of novel design implications. Furthermore, the experiment reveals a correlation between IVBO and game enjoyment, which is a further indication that nonhumanoid creatures offer a meaningful design space for VR games worth further investigation.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1907.07466,
title = {Beyond Human: Animals as an Escape from Stereotype Avatars in Virtual Reality Games},
author = {Andrey Krekhov and Sebastian Cmentowski and Katharina Emmerich and Jens Krüger},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.07466},
year = {2019}
}