Study of self-avatar's influence on motor skills training in immersive virtual environments

Immersive virtual reality simulators are increasingly being used in different domains. One open research problematic of such systems is the user's representation inside the environment, what is called, the self-avatar representation. Our research focus on using immersive virtual environments (IVEs) for training motor skills. In this case, the typical self-avatar representation is the user's hand. Researchers have focused on studying the influence of hand appearance and structure on the user's sense of presence and embodiment, but little is known about the role it plays in learning motor skills. In this paper we present the design and implementation of a virtual reality (VR) training simulator for a basic motor task, as well as the design of an experiment to investigate this research problematic.