Influence of Hand Representation Design on Presence and Embodiment in Virtual Environment

Previous research results have emphasized the influence of avatar representations on user perception in virtual environments, including presence and embodiment. It has been reported that realistic hands present a strong sense of presence and body ownership, while there is a controversy about the sense of agency. This paper investigates the influence of virtual hand representation on user perception and the association between the sense of body ownership and agency. An experiment based on virtual reality was designed with hand representations of different levels of realism to collect users’ perception data through questionnaires, and the Spearman correlation was adopted to analyze the relationship between body ownership and agency. The results show that realistic hand induces the higher sense of presence and body ownership, but there is no significant difference in the sense of agency. Moreover, a positive correlation between body ownership and agency in virtual environments was found.