Realistic virtual hands: Exploring how appearance affects the sense of embodiment

Abstract: How would you react if you looked down on your hands and they had been replaced with someone else’s hands? This is the case for virtual reality applications that incorporate virtual hands, all applications have their own representation of virtual hands but none takes the user’s own hand into account. For this reason, we have created a framework that allows to customize geometric features of existing hand models towards a more personal hand representation. We have designed and conducted an experiment to study sense of ownership of four virtual hand representations. It was found that participants pay attention to size of the hand and the length of the fingers but do not necessarily consider the virtual hands as their own. We believe that a virtual hand that truly creates the impression of one’s own hand may benefit educational, training or rehabilitation virtual reality applications. In order to achieve this, our conclusion is that a certain extent of size, shape and appearance of the user’s hand need to be considered.