Towards Full Body Co-Embodiment of Human and Non-Human Avatars in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Co-embodiment, which enables users to share virtual avatars with other entities such as users, robots, or autonomous agents, has raised interest in the Virtual Reality community over the past five years. Most co-embodiment studies and implementations only relied on human avatar representation and provided upper-body shared control with the avatar and the users remaining seated. In this work-in-progress paper, we present two new designs of co-embodiment for two users: (1) a full-body shared human avatar and (2) a non-human avatar with four limbs and two heads. We describe the preliminary implementations of our approaches and discuss the potential application and research areas of co-embodiment.