Drumming in immersive virtual reality: The body shapes the way we play

Summary form only given. It has been shown that it is possible to generate perceptual illusions of ownership in immersive virtual reality (IVR) over a virtual body that visually substitutes a person´s real body, independently of appearance differences between the two [1, 2]. However, the psychological, behavioral and attitudinal consequences of such body transformations remain unknown [3]. Thirty six Caucasian people participated in a between-groups experiment where they played a West-African Djembe hand drum accompanying another avatar inside IVR. Participants were represented by plainly shaded white hands in the baseline condition, and either a casually dressed dark-skinned virtual body (CD) or a formal suited light-skinned body (FL) in the experimental conditions. Although the experienced body ownership illusion was strong for both groups, only the CD representation produced significant increases in participants´ movement patterns compared to the baseline and compared to the FL representation. Further analysis showed that the observed behavioral changes were a function of the illusion strength and the perceived appropriateness of the virtual body for drumming. These results demonstrate that full body ownership illusions can lead to substantial behavioral and possibly cognitive changes depending on the virtual body appearance, with important implications for learning, education, training, psychotherapy and rehabilitation applications using IVR.