Abstract
Virtual Reality (VR) might give us a glimpse of what it feels to have a different from human shaped body and how to orientate ourselves in virtual environment (VE) with it. Bats’ wings structure has anatomical similarities to a human hand; yet would it be possible to achieve a compelling illusion of virtual body ownership (VBO) over bat’s avatar is questionable. Hence our main aim of research is to imitate bat’s sonar system and achieve embodiment of anatomically similar but morphologically different body – a body of a bat. Test results showed a possibility to achieve VBO illusion using bat’s avatar. VBO was significantly higher when steering through VE, as opposed to steering without a virtual body and exposing to involuntary movement through VE. With our research prototype, users will be able to navigate with echolocation system and fly through a virtual cave.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Andreasen, A., Nilsson, N.C., Serafin, S.: Agency enhances body ownership illusion of being a virtual bat. In: IEEE Virtual Reality 2018. IEEE Press (2018)
Andreasen, A., Nilsson, N.C., Serafin, S.: Spatial asynchronous visuo-tactile stimuli influence ownership of virtual wings. In: IEEE Virtual Reality 2018. IEEE Press (2018)
Kilteni, K., Normand, J.M., Sanchez-Vives, M.V., Slater, M.: Extending body space in immersive virtual reality: a very long arm illusion. PLoS ONE 7(7), e40867 (2012)
Maselli, A., Slater, M.: The building blocks of the full body ownership illusion. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 7, 83 (2013)
Nagel, T.: What is it like to be a bat? Philos. Rev. 83(4), 435–450 (1974)
Serafin, S., Geronazzo, M., Nilsson, N.C., Erkut, C., Nordahl, R.: Sonic interactions in virtual reality: state of the art, current challenges and future directions. IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl. 38(2), 31–43 (2018)
Steptoe, W., Steed, A., Slater, M.: Human tails: ownership and control of extended humanoid avatars. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 19(4), 583–590 (2013)
Thaler, L., et al.: Mouth-clicks used by blind expert human echolocators - signal description and model based signal synthesis. PLOS Comput. Biol. 13(8), e1005670 (2017)
Zovnercuka, J., Konovalovs, K., Andreasen, A., Geronazzo, M., Serafin, S., Paisa, R.: Navigate as a bat. Real-time echolocation system in virtual reality. In: Proceedings of 15th International Sound and Music Computing Conference (2018)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering
About this paper
Cite this paper
Andreasen, A., Nilsson, N.C., Zovnercuka, J., Geronazzo, M., Serafin, S. (2019). What Is It Like to Be a Virtual Bat?. In: Brooks, A., Brooks, E., Sylla, C. (eds) Interactivity, Game Creation, Design, Learning, and Innovation. ArtsIT DLI 2018 2018. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 265. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06134-0_57
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06134-0_57
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-06133-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-06134-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)