Agency Deficits in a Human Genetic Model of Schizophrenia: Insights From 22q11DS Patients.

Schizophrenia is a chronic and disabling mental illness characterized by a disordered sense of self. Current theories suggest that deficiencies in the sense of control over one's actions (Sense of Agency, SoA) may underlie some of the symptoms of schizophrenia. However, it is not clear if agency deficits are a precursor or a result of psychosis.

On the Plausibility of Virtual Body Animation Features in Virtual Reality.

We present two experiments to assess the relative impact of different levels of body animation fidelity on plausibility illusion (Psi). The first experiment presents a virtual character that is not controlled by the user ( n=13), while the second experiment presents a user-controlled virtual avatar ( n=24, all male). Psi concerns how realistic and coherent the events in a virtual environment look and feel and is part of Slater's proposition of two orthogonal components of presence in virtual reality (VR).

The Critical Role of Self-Contact for Embodiment in Virtual Reality.

With the broad range of motion capture devices available on the market, it is now commonplace to directly control the limb movement of an avatar during immersion in a virtual environment. Here, we study how the subjective experience of embodying a full-body controlled avatar is influenced by motor alteration and self-contact mismatches. Self-contact is in particular a strong source of passive haptic feedback and we assume it to bring a clear benefit in terms of embodiment.

Characterizing first and third person viewpoints and their alternation for embodied interaction in virtual reality.

Empirical research on the bodily self has shown that the body representation is malleable, and prone to manipulation when conflicting sensory stimuli are presented. Using Virtual Reality (VR) we assessed the effects of manipulating multisensory feedback (full body control and visuo-tactile congruence) and visual perspective (first and third person perspective) on the sense of embodying a virtual body that was exposed to a virtual threat. We also investigated how subjects behave when the possibility of alternating between first and third person perspective at will was presented.

Egocentric Mapping of Body Surface Constraints.

The relative location of human body parts often materializes the semantics of on-going actions, intentions and even emotions expressed, or performed, by a human being. However, traditional methods of performance animation fail to correctly and automatically map the semantics of performer postures involving self-body contacts onto characters with different sizes and proportions. Our method proposes an egocentric normalization of the body-part relative distances to preserve the consistency of self contacts for a large variety of human-like target characters.

Anatomic hepatectomy planning through mobile display visualization and interaction.

Hepatectomies are resections in which segments of the liver are extracted. While medical images are fundamental in the surgery planning procedure, the process of analysis of such images slice-by-slice is still tedious and inefficient. In this work we propose a strategy to efficiently and semi-automatically segment and classify patient-specific liver models in 3D through a mobile display device.