Self-touch: an immersive interaction-technique to enhance body awareness

Abstract

Physical well-being depends essentially on how the own body is perceived. A missing correspondence between the perception of one’s own body and reality can be distressing and eventually lead to mental illness. The touch of the own body is a multi-sensory experience to strengthen the feeling of the own body. We have developed an interaction technique that allows the self-touch of the own body in an immersive environment to support therapy procedures. Through additional visual feedback, we want to strengthen the feeling for the own body to achieve a sustainable effect in the own body perception. We conducted an expert evaluation to analyse the potential impact of our application and to localize and fix possible usability problems. The experts noted the ease of understanding and suitability of the interaction technique for increasing body awareness. However, the technical challenges such as stable and accurate body tracking were also mentioned. In addition, new ideas were given that would further support body awareness.