Effects of Multiple Avatar Images Presented Consecutively with Temporal Delays on Self-Body Recognition

Self-body awareness refers to the recognition of one's body as one's own and consists of two senses: “sense of body ownership” and “sense of agency.” In telexistence/telepresence robot operation, time delays in the robot's motion degrade self-body awareness of the robot body. We investigated how self-body recognition can be affected in a telexistence robot operation in a VR space when the robot is presented with a real robot arm that simulates a real robot with a delay and a virtual robot arm, or several virtual robot arms, with a delay less than that of the real robot. These experimental conditions include a ‘Predictive Display,’ which is well known as a time delay countermeasure. The results suggest that virtual robot arms presented consecutively with less delay than a real robot arm do not induce a sense of body ownership to the real robot arm, but they enhance the sense of agency to the real robot arm, and that sense of agency is stronger when the task requires precision.