Inducing Body-Transfer Illusions in VR by Providing Brief Phases of Visual-Tactile Stimulation

Current developments in the area of virtual reality (VR) allow numerous users to experience immersive virtual environments (VEs) in a broad range of application fields. In the same way, some research has shown novel advances in wearable devices to provide vibrotactile feedback which can be combined with low-cost technology for hand tracking and gestures recognition. The combination of these technologies can be used to investigate interesting psychological illusions. For instance, body-transfer illusions, such as the rubber-hand illusion or elongated-arm illusion, have shown that it is possible to give a person the persistent illusion of body transfer after only brief phases of synchronized visual-haptic stimulation. The motivation of this paper is to induce such perceptual illusions by combining VR, vibrotactile and tracking technologies, offering an interesting way to create new spatial interaction experiences centered on the senses of sight and touch. We present a technology framework that includes a pair of self-made gloves featuring vibrotactile feedback that can be synchronized with audio-visual stimulation in order to reproduce body-transfer illusions in VR. We present in detail the implementation of the framework and show that the proposed technology setup is able to induce the elongated-arm illusion providing automatic tactile stimuli, instead of the traditional approach based on manually synchronized stimulation.