ИСТИНА

The aim of the study was to investigate the effects of virtual body characteristics on subject’s perception. Subjects moved their right hand and observed the avatar in the first-person perspective in head-mounted display. Virtual arm (tracked by Kinect) was displayed 10 cm to the right of the actual position of subject’s arm. There were three conditions: asynchronous (pre-recorded virtual arm movements didn't coincide with the actual ones), synchronous anthropomorphic and synchronous non-anthropomorphic. Subject was asked to perform purposeful actions (dropping things from the table) in synchronous conditions while virtual body was either similar to human or consisted of parallelepipeds. Subject performed pointing task that measured the proprioceptive hand perception accuracy before and after each condition. Self-identification with the seen body was assessed by a questionnaire. Statistical analysis (ANOVA, corrected for multiple comparisons) revealed that 1)significant changes of proprioception in pointing task were in both synchronous conditions, regardless of whether the arm was anthropomorphic or not; 2)changes were detected in the asynchronous condition which indicated that moving arm observation from the first-person perspective also changed body position perception accuracy. Questionnaire results showed that body ownership was induced by synchronous conditions (both anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic) but not by the asynchronous one. Funding: The reported study was funded by RFBR according to the research project No.16-36-00394 мол_а