Designing VR for Understanding Physiological Effects of Embodiment and Multi-sensory Modalities
2020-08
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Designing VR for Understanding Physiological Effects of Embodiment and Multi-sensory Modalities
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2020-08
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Virtual Reality (VR) is becoming more and more recognized in various fields as a way to train and educate people. VR has become popular for its spatial audio-visual perception of alternate virtual environments. One other reason it is becoming more accessible is because of larger companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple investing a lot of money to do VR research to roll out VR gear that is much more affordable than they used to be five years ago. In this thesis, we developed software that can be used to conduct VR studies and measure physiological responses related to immersion and presence experienced in VR. The sense of presence in virtual environments may be a key factor in how we perceive and act in VR. Recent studies in VR have also shown that embodiment can improve immersion and engagement. Embodiment is a sense of having a virtual body that a user can relate to as being their own. But giving a virtual avatar for the user is not easy as it requires hardware synchronization with the VR application. Moreover, collecting physiological signal data to understand the effects of embodiment involves sensors that need to be used alongside this other equipment. The main component of this thesis is a software system for research studies that explore the effect of embodiment and multi-sensory modalities on the physiology of a participant. There has been much growth in how virtual reality technology is being used in various areas like planning and architecture, medical surgeries, education, and research. VR offers a real-time immersive experience, interactive simulation. Our thesis is a building block that encourages future researchers to do large scale expansive studies to understand the psychophysiological effects of body ownership and to also increase the number of studies that can be done by a larger array of researchers. By understanding these effects, we can further explore the possibilities of VR in the areas mentioned above. We also discuss how embodiment will affect the sense of presence of a person in a virtual environment. Moreover, we will show how our software can be used to present various stimuli easily and record physiological responses using a wearable sensor. We built a virtual environment for this purpose which integrates hardware together to enable embodiment, multiple-sensory modalities, and collect physiological evidence.
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University of Minnesota M.S. thesis. August 2020. Major: Computer Science. Advisor: Pete Willemsen. 1 computer file (PDF); viii, 70 pages.
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Kothapalli, Sai. (2020). Designing VR for Understanding Physiological Effects of Embodiment and Multi-sensory Modalities. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/216761.
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