Am I (Not) a Ghost? Leveraging Affordances to Study the Impact of Avatar/Interaction Coherence on Embodiment and Plausibility in Virtual Reality

This IEEE conference talk explores how avatars suggest possibilities for action (affordances) in virtual reality and how incongruence affects user experience. Discover research from Arts et Métiers Institute of Technology that initially aimed to investigate affordance manipulation's impact on embodiment but revealed unexpected findings. Learn how participants' behavior was driven by processes that took precedence over affordance perception, and how researchers inadvertently manipulated internal congruence through repeated exposures. Understand how this disruption in plausibility significantly reduced both embodiment scores and performance. Part of the "Presence, body ownership, and agency" session at IEEE VR 2025, this 10-minute presentation by Florian Dufresne, Charlotte Dubosc, Titouan Lefrou, Geoffrey Gorisse, and Olivier Christmann offers valuable insights into avatar design and its psychological effects in virtual environments.