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Authors & Affiliations
Ai Souma, Suguru N. Kudoh
Abstract
In order to improve the immersive experience of Virtual Reality (VR), this research aims to elucidate how people perceive self-location and to develop a method to transfer “the sensation of me being here” to another location. In order to elucidate this perception for self-location, I focused on the out-of-body experience (OBE) in which one's consciousness is localised outside the body, and one perceives oneself as if one is looking at one's own body from this position. Conventional induction methods for pseudo-OBE involve projecting images of mannequins or virtual bodies in VR and applying tactile stimuli to these bodies and to the real body at the same time, in order to create the illusion of a sense of self-possession on the mannequin or virtual body side. However, the position of the self in the OBE is thought to exist on “the viewpoint side”, not the material body. Therefore, in this study, we attempted to induce an out-of-body experience by using viewpoint-shifting and self-image-presentation in order to make the subject aware that the place where he or she is located has moved, using virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display. After the experiment, the participants answered a questionnaire based on the questionnaire developed by Lenggenhager et al. and Ehrsson et al. As a result, although the bodies of the experimental participants did not move, they felt as if they themselves were moving as their viewpoint shifted. It was suggested that the position of the self may depend on the viewpoint.