  Recently, there has been growing interest in investigating the effects of
self-representation on user experience and perception in virtual environments.
However, few studies investigated the effects of levels of body representation
(full-body, lower-body and viewpoint) on locomotion experience in terms of
spatial awareness, self-presence and spatial presence during virtual
locomotion. Understanding such effects is essential for building new virtual
locomotion systems with better locomotion experience. In the present study, we
first built a walking-in-place (WIP) virtual locomotion system that can
represent users using avatars at three levels (full-body, lower-body and
viewpoint) and is capable of rendering walking animations during in-place
walking of a user. We then conducted a virtual locomotion experiment using
three levels of representation to investigate the effects of body
representation on spatial awareness, self-presence and spatial presence during
virtual locomotion. Experimental results showed that the full-body
representation provided better virtual locomotion experience in these three
factors compared to that of the lower-body representation and the viewpoint
representation. The lower-body representation also provided better experience
than the viewpoint representation. These results suggest that
self-representation of users in virtual environments using a full-body avatar
is critical for providing better locomotion experience. Using full-body avatars
for self-representation of users should be considered when building new virtual
locomotion systems and applications.
