I Have a Claw! Impact of Embodying a Biomimetic Avatar on Self-Perception and Task Performance in Virtual Reality

Embodied representations are known to influence user behavior in virtual environments through stereotypes associated with their appearance, a phenomenon known as the Proteus effect, or through perceived affordances. The latter concept refers to the suggested ways of interacting with the environment as perceived by the capabilities of the user's virtual representation. The inherent ability of virtual reality to support non-anthropomorphic avatars, enabling new interaction modalities, paves the way for a deeper understanding of affordances in virtual environments. We designed an experiment to assess the effect of embodying a chimeric hand (crab claw), compared to a regular hand, on participants' sense of embodiment, presence, character plausibility, mental workload, and behavior. Following a within-subject design, participants took part in a gamified task consisting of finding a key in a wrecked pirate ship. As the key could be hidden in containers of different durability, their strategy (opening or destroying objects) was used as an objective measure. Results indicated a high perceived usability and a low mental workload with both virtual limbs. Participants also performed hitting actions more frequently when using the biomimetic limb than when using the humanoid hand representation. A higher perceived change in the body schema was reported when embodying the crab claw, but a higher sense of body ownership and agency were observed with the anthropomorphic hand. Results revealed no significant difference in terms of plausibility.