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SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article

Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Public Mental Health
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1455495
This article is part of the Research Topic Understanding the Role of New Media in Psychiatry View all 4 articles

Borders of Physical Self in Virtual Reality: A Systematic Review of Virtual Hand Position Discrepancy Detection

Provisionally accepted
David Antoš David Antoš 1Tomáš Švec Tomáš Švec 2Jana Hořínková Jana Hořínková 1Eliška Bartečková Eliška Bartečková 1*
  • 1 Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia
  • 2 Department of Computer Graphics and Multimedia, Faculty of Information Technology, Brno University of Technology, Brno, South Moravia, Czechia

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Virtual reality (VR) holds significant promise for psychiatric research, treatment, and assessment. Its unique ability to elicit immersion and presence is important for effective interventions. Immersion and presence are influenced by matching-the alignment between provided sensory information and user feedback, and self-presentation-the depiction of a user's virtual body or limbs. Discrepancies between real and virtual hands can affect the sense of presence and thus treatment efficacy. However, the precise impact of positional offsets in healthy individuals remains under-explored. This review assesses how various factors influence the detection thresholds for positional offsets in VR among healthy subjects.Methods: A comprehensive database search targeted English-language studies on the detection thresholds of virtual hand positional offsets using head-mounted displays (HMDs) with specific tracking capabilities. Data on methodologies, participant demographics, and VR system specifics were extracted.Results: Thirteen studies met the inclusion criteria, revealing significant variability in detection thresholds-from a few millimeters to 42 cm for linear shifts and from 2°to 45°for angular shifts. Sensitivity to these offsets was affected by hand movement direction and magnitude, hand representation realism, and the presence of distractions. VR system specifications, such as resolution and tracking accuracy, also played a significant role. Methodological issues included small sample sizes, inadequate demographic reporting, and inconsistent presence or avatar embodiment measures.The results highlight the need to consider identified influencing factors to maximize user presence in VR-based therapies. Variability in VR device capabilities also emphasizes the need for detailed reporting of device properties in research. The individual variability in offset detection further illustrates VR's potential as a tool for studying body ownership and multisensory integration.

    Keywords: virtual reality, body ownership, Hand redirection, Bodily self-consciousness, self-location, Just Noticable Difference, point of subjective equality, detection threshold

    Received: 26 Jun 2024; Accepted: 27 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Antoš, Švec, Hořínková and Bartečková. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Eliška Bartečková, Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.