Through my experiments I have found that to be embodied in a space, it helps to have agency over the virtual body you inhabit. This can be enhance by the use of virtual hands, feet and shadows which you can control with controllers. I attempted to create a virtual space where with a first person controller, you can control the movement of hands, to enhance the immersive experience of the space. Through this experiment I wanted to test whether the presense of virtual hands created a environment that made the user engage with the space being presented to them.
I created a space in unity where the person could walk around the space and control the hands which were attached to the first person controller.
The hands are controlled by the VR controller settings of the VR Vive. The hands are animated in different positions and the controllers control the idle and catch - clench - settings which move the hands. I downloaded these hands from the Unity Store and they also came with punch and pistol controls, however for the purpose of this experiment these settings will not be nessicary.
I exported the a earlier skecthup build that I had created last year as a fbx file which I could then import into unity as an asset. Initially the object comes up as a shell so you have to edit the mesh of the object so that your first person character can not walk straight through the building and can walk through the levels of the buildings as the floors come up as blocks. This mean however, because I did not have an open door in my model, I could not enter the building in VR.
(video)
When experiencing the space in VR there were a couple of obvious issues with the unity file. One main issue was that the hands were not attached to the Vive controllers and this meant that the hands were stuck in idle and you could not move them up and down. Although the response to having hands were good, the way that I used them was very different from my cognitive understanding of my bodies hands. Also the hands were placed on the avatar lower than they would be in real life. If I can manage to attach the Virtual hands to the controllers motion sensor, the hands would be a lot more convincing.
Secondly, I found that the scale of the building was too small and so they must be scaled up to imitate a real life experience of chairs.
Thirdly, the lack of sound in the VR experience was obviously absent, if there was to be sound in the virtual space it would have immersed more of my sensors.
FINDINGS:
I found that with these virtual hands it gave me a greater embodiment with the virtual space and made me want to engage with the space more. It was clear that the imagery of the hands gave me a further understanding of how I would engage with the space. It made the space feel more probable and my presense in the space was much more evident.
Credit to https://naturemanufacture.com for the VR Hand files and animation.
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