Characterizing Device Transitions and Their Impact on Presence, Embodiment and Avatar Identification in Cross-Platform Virtual Environments

Cross-platform virtual environments allow users to experience interactive virtual places from a variety of peripherals, such as mobiles, computers or virtual reality headsets. These devices offer different interactivity and immersion levels, which shape the subjective experience of presence in the virtual space. Moreover, users may be provided with virtual representations, or avatars, to evolve in the environment. Controlling such avatars will likely induce a sense of embodiment and an identification toward these representations. When using cross-platform applications, users may have to transpose their experience across different devices, likely transporting their avatar and prior experience with them. In this context, understanding the impact of device transitions and prior experience may have over user experience constructs appears critical. We designed an experiment to explore their effects, which primarily unveiled that transitioning from high-immersion devices to low-immersion ones causes a significant drop in users' sense of presence, embodiment and identification. These results are supposedly due to a comparison effect between devices emphasized by the strong expectations created by the first exposure in VR. Our study further unveiled a strong connection between the sense of embodiment and character identification demonstrated by statistical correlations. It finally confirmed that identification may persist across devices and exposures, shedding light on this avatar-related construct for research on cross-device realities.