Embodying self in virtual worlds

Ali Mazalek

Sanjay Chandrasekharan

Michael Nitsche

Tim Welsh

Paul Clifton

pp. 129-151

in: Anna Peachey, Mark Childs (eds), Reinventing ourselves, Berlin, Springer, 2011

Abstract

Players project their intentions, expressions and movements into ­virtual worlds. A dominant reference point for this projection is their avatar. We explore the transfer of a player's own body movements onto their virtual self, drawing on cognitive science's common coding theory as a model for understanding their self-recognition. This chapter presents the results of two sets of self-recognition experiments that investigated the connections between player and virtual avatar. In the first set of experiments, we investigated self-­recognition of movement in different levels of abstraction between players and their avatars. The second set of ­experiments made use of an embodied interface for virtual character control that was designed based on common coding principles. The results demonstrate that this interface is effective in personalising a player's ­avatar and could be used to unlock higher cognitive effects compared to other interfaces.