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

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. VR provides an enclosed virtual environment in which users can become immersed, can move and look freely at 360degree 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, we examine how immersion can be enhanced by the theoretical constructs of agency and body ownership in a VR space. Therefore, we investigate the perception of agency and the sense of body ownership with 69 participants in a laboratory study with a self-developed VR environment. We found a positive significant effect of agency but no effect of body ownership on immersion.

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