Astral Body: A Virtual Reality Game for Body Ownership Investigation

As one of the most disruptive human-computer interaction techniques, Virtual Reality (VR) provides a novel way to examine human movements, e.g. when investigating Body Ownership (BO) in the field of cognitive sciences, especially when the visual output diverges from real-world actions. Previous research in BO uses questionnaires and brain imaging, where the former is a highly subjective metric, and the latter is very costly in time, money, and personnel. To answer the question How can a VR serious game help overcome current challenges of BO assessment?, we designed Astral Body, a VR game that helps cognitive science researchers assess people’s level of BO. In the game, players are asked to grab ‘flying collectibles’ coming from a portal in space. Researchers can inject different types and levels of asynchrony into the arms of the visualized avatar, thus affecting the players’ BO experience and perception. Players, in turn, can also report whenever they perceive possible mismatched avatar behavior. In addition, researchers can analyze player data, including looking for unconscious responses, e.g. small adjustments in physical movements to mitigate injected asynchrony. Preliminary results from playtesting and qualitative analysis of Astral Bodyindicate that a VR game can effectively help researchers investigate BO phenomena.