How a lack of haptic feedback affects eye-hand coordination and embodiment in virtual reality

Intuitively, we know that how we perceive and act in the world is profoundly affected when the lights go out. But what happens to visuomotor control when our sense of touch is taken away? Notably this happens in Virtual Reality (VR) and for prosthesis users. We test this question by combining VR and hand-, motion- and eye-tracking to give and deprive full haptic feedback to individuals with normal hand function during a validated object interaction task. Returning haptic feedback in VR generated eye-hand coordination more similar to real-world interactions. Interestingly, VR users and prosthesis users have both reported reduced feelings of embodiment towards their limbs. Therefore, we also quantified the sense of embodiment which increased with haptic feedback. We further reported a correlation between eye-hand coordination and an individual's sense of embodiment suggesting that the embodiment is experienced as the synchronized reception of sensory information and that eye-hand coordination measures are an objective way to quantify these experiences.