Asaf Ali Altun¹ (altunalia@gmail.com), Loes CJ van Dam², William Harwin¹, Peter Scarfe¹; ¹University of Reading, ²Technical University of Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt)

Feelings of ownership, agency, and presence (OAP) are fundamental to virtual reality experiences, yet they are susceptible to disruption by factors such as temporal delay, which creates a mismatch between predicted and observed sensory consequences. Previous research by van Dam and Stephens (2018) has demonstrated that users can adapt to sensory feedback delays and that this results in concurrent improvements in OAP. However, it remains unclear whether any form of temporal delay in general disrupts OAP, or if the delay must be relevant to the user's immediate task. Here, we present data replicating and extending van Dam and Stephens (2018) using a virtual reality target-tracking task, wherein participants controlled a cursor to match the 3D position of a moving target. The novel aspect of our experiment involved introducing a temporal delay into either translation (task-relevant) and/or rotation (task-irrelevant) of the cursor. This allowed us to determine if the temporal delay needed to be task-relevant to impact feelings of OAP. Our results confirm previous findings: Imposing a 200ms temporal delay in the 3D position of the cursor initially results in decreased feelings of OAP, but over time, as participants adapt to the temporal delay and get better at the tracking task, feelings of OAP increase. Critically, however, we found that temporal delay applied to rotation had no significant effect on either task performance or subjective measures. These findings demonstrate that one can experience significant temporal delays in a virtual environment without diminishing ownership, agency, or presence, provided those delays are irrelevant to the task. This suggests a close linkage between sensory adaptation driven by task-relevant error and the restoration of subjective feelings of OAP, rather than sensory (in)consistency in general.

Acknowledgements: This research was generously supported by the Republic of Türkiye Ministry of National Education.