How to Induce a Physical and Virtual Rubber Hand Illusion

Abstract

Understanding body ownership is essential when creating virtual reality (VR) applications using avatars. One of the most widely-used paradigm to investigate body ownership is the rubber hand illusion (RHI). When a real hand and a rubber hand are stroked synchronously, participants can experience the rubber hand as their own hand. Although the knowledge from RHI experiments in the real world is applied to when users embody avatars in VR, it is still unclear whether the illusory ownership of a virtual and physical body produce the same effects. In addition, conducting RHI studies in VR would allow gaining a range of novel experiments that are not possible in the real world. With this demonstration, we therefore present a system and approach to investigate the RHI in the real world and in VR.