The effect of realism on the virtual hand illusion

The virtual hand illusion is a body ownership illusion that occurs in a virtual environment. Previous studies reached different conclusions on the effect of realism of the controllable virtual hand model on the intensity of the perceived illusion. In our experiments, we compare participants' responses to virtual impacts and threats when using hand models with different levels of realism. Our findings indicate that an illusion can be created for any model but that the effect is perceived weakest for a non-anthropomorphic block model and strongest for a realistic human hand model in direct comparison. We furthermore find that the reactions to our experiments highly vary between participants.