Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a scorpion on the floor of the desert, or a bird that is trapped in a cruel cage? Psychologists from the University of Duisburg-Essen, a school in Germany, are using virtual reality to dive into the human brain and test the limits of being immersed in another animals body.
“Virtual reality setups are particularly suited to create a tight bond between players and their avatars up to a degree where we start perceiving the virtual representation as our own body,” said Andrey Krekhov, a member of the projects research team Germany. “We hypothesize that such an illusion of virtual body ownership (IVBO) has a particularly high, yet overlooked potential for nonhumanoid avatars.”
What the team wanted to do is test how much the people buy into the idea of being another species. They want to know how long we have to be immersed in another body to believe its ours, the psychological benefits of being another animal in virtual reality, and even the unknown benefits of playing as an animal in virtual reality. This is how they did it.
The team gathered 37 volunteers and studied their reactions to different illusions while they were grading and evaluating their experiences inside of the headset. The three main animals that were tested for this project were the rhino, bird, and a scorpion. Within the simulation they had different controls to perfect the movements of their new virtual bodies.
The team found that being in control of another body while still being within yours can be even more immersive and fun than a regular avatar inside of VR. “Our experiment shows that even spiders, despite having a skeleton that significantly differs from ours, offer a similar degree of the illusion of virtual body ownership compared to humanoid avatars,” said the team. Surprisingly enough, the spider and the bat ranked higher than any other animal. With shapes of bodies that aren’t nearly the same as the human body, this is something the research team didn’t expect to come out of their experiments.
“The bat behaved exactly how I expected,” said one participant, “and it was intriguing to precisely control my wing movements because it appeared realistic to me.” With this comment, it seems like the controls may have been superior for this animal. We might be reading into it, but we highly doubt that if each animal had perfect controls, that bat would still be top 2. That is motion sickness waiting to happen inside of virtual reality, while you’re hanging upside down.
Not only does this report show that being immersed in another animal is realistic, but it shows that people are willing to do it for longer periods of time. Gaming while in a lions body may finally be a reality inside of your virtual world in the near future. The report even says that “In our opinion, incorporating animals as player avatars into VR has the potential to unveil a set of novel game mechanics and maybe even lead to a “beastly” VR game genre. Utilizing the abilities of animals such as flying as a bird or crawling as a spider could be significantly more engaging in VR due to the increased presence compared to non-VR games.”
No matter how you look at gaming inside of virtual reality, turning into an animal of your choice could be both immersive and very fun. We hope that with this technology and the research that has been done, developers will listen to the people and make a game with animals worth playing with.
