I Feel You: Impact of Shared Body Sensations on Social Interactions in Virtual Reality

While one’s facial expression and voice can be easily broadcasted from one to many via digital media, the sense of touch is limited to direct interactions. What happens if such body sensations can be shared across individuals, in which one feels a touch while watching someone else being touched? In this work, we investigated the impact of such shared body sensations on social interactions in virtual reality (VR). Building upon previous research that used psychophysics methods, our work explores the practical implications of shared body sensations in Social VR, which enables interactions beyond what’s physically possible. We conducted a withingroup user study ($\mathrm{n}=32$) in which participants observed conversations between two virtual agents and shared touch with one of the agents, as shown in Figure 1. Our results showed that even experiencing shared touch sensations several times during a conversation can affect social perception and behavior. Participants reported a stronger body illusion and empathy towards the virtual agent they shared touch with and stood closer to them. These results occurred both with and without a virtual mirror that made participants’ selfavatars more salient. The findings from this study introduce a new technique to enhance social connectedness in VR, and we discuss its applications in various contexts, such as asynchronous communication and collaboration.