"One Body, But Four Hands": Exploring the Role of Virtual Hands in Virtual Co-embodiment

Virtual co-embodiment in virtual reality (VR) allows two users to share an avatar, enabling skill transfer from teachers to learners and influencing their Sense of Ownership (SoO) and Sense of Agency (SoA). However, mismatches between actual movements and displayed actions in VR can impair user experience, posing challenges to learning effectiveness. Although previous studies have addressed the influence of virtual bodies' visual factors on SoO and SoA, the impact of co-embodied hands' appearances remains underexplored. We conducted two user studies to examine the effects of virtual self-hands' existence and their visual factors (transparency and congruency) on SoO, SoA, and social presence. Study One showed significant improvements in SoO and SoA with the existence of virtual self-hands. In Study Two, we kept the self-hands and further focused on hand transparency and congruency. We found that identical appearances between self-hands and co-embodied hands significantly enhanced SoO. These findings stressed the importance of visual factors for virtual hands, offering valuable insights for VR co-embodiment design.