Mel Slater

• BSc MA MSc DSc
• Professor at University of Barcelona

Sensorimotor contingencies (SC) refer to the rules by which we use our body to perceive. It has been argued that to the extent that a virtual reality (VR) application affords natural SC so the greater likelihood that participants will experience Place Illusion (PI), the illusion of ‘being there’ (a component of presence) in the virtual environment....

This study explores the impact of embodied experiences in Virtual Reality (VR) on individuals' attitudes and behavior towards climate change. A total of 41 participants were divided into two groups: an embodied group that interacted with a virtual environment through full-body avatars, and a non-embodied group that observed the scenarios from an in...

When engaging in physical contact, our emotional response hinges not only on the nuanced sensory details and the receptive properties of the skin but also on contextual cues related to the situation and interpersonal dynamics. The consensus is that the nature of the affective interactive experience in social touch is shaped by a combination of asce...

Background Exposure therapy (ET) for anxiety disorders involves introducing the participant to an anxiety-provoking situation over several treatment sessions. Each time, the participant is exposed to a higher anxiety-provoking stimulus; for example, in the case of fear of heights, the participant would successively experience being at a greater hei...

Research has shown that incorporating haptics into virtual environments can increase sensory fidelity and provide powerful and immersive experiences. However, current studies on haptics in virtual interactions primarily focus on one-on-one scenarios, while kinesthetic haptic interactions in large virtual gatherings are underexplored. This study aim...

Moving through a virtual environment that is larger than the physical space in which the participant operates has been a challenge since the early days of virtual reality. Many different methods have been proposed, such as joystick-based navigation, walking in place where the participant makes walking movements but is stationary in the physical spa...

VR United is a virtual reality application that we have developed to support multiple people simultaneously interacting in the same environment. Each person is represented with a virtual body that looks like themselves. Such immersive shared environments have existed and been the subject of research for the past 30 years. Here, we demonstrate how V...

Change blindness (CB) is the perceptual phenomenon whereby people are blind to dramatic changes in their visual environment. In virtual reality (VR) a person’s body can be substituted by a life-sized virtual one that moves synchronously with their real body movements as their self-representation. We consider whether CB occurs in VR, and whether the...

BACKGROUND Exposure therapy (ET) for anxiety disorders involves introducing the participant to an anxiety-provoking situation over several treatment sessions. Each time, the participant is exposed to a higher anxiety-provoking stimulus; for example, in the case of fear of heights, the participant would successively experience being at a greater hei...

Rehabilitation and prevention strategies to reduce intimate partner violence (IPV) have limited effectiveness in terms of improving key risk factors and reducing occurrence. Accumulated experimental evidence demonstrates that virtual embodiment, which results in the illusion of owning a virtual body, has a large impact on people’s emotional, cognit...

This work deals with the automatic 3D reconstruction of objects from frontal RGB images. This aims at a better understanding of the reconstruction of 3D objects from RGB images and their use in immersive virtual environments. We propose a complete workflow that can be easily adapted to almost any other family of rigid objects. To explain and valida...

In the last few years the field of Virtual Reality (VR) has experienced significant growth through the introduction of low-cost VR devices to the mass market. However, VR has been used for many years by researchers since it has proven to be a powerful tool across a vast array of research fields and applications. The key aspect of any VR experience...

We created a virtual reality version of a 1983 performance by Dire Straits, this being a highly complex scenario consisting of both the virtual band performance and the appearance and behaviour of the virtual audience surrounding the participants. Our goal was to understand the responses of participants, and to learn how this type of scenario might...

Domestic violence has long-term negative consequences on children. In this study, men with a history of partner aggression and a control group of non-offenders were embodied in a child’s body from a first-person perspective in virtual reality (VR). From this perspective, participants witnessed a scene of domestic violence where a male avatar assaul...

We review the concept of presence in virtual reality, normally thought of as the sense of “being there” in the virtual world. We argued in a 2009 paper that presence consists of two orthogonal illusions that we refer to as Place Illusion (PI, the illusion of being in the place depicted by the VR) and Plausibility (Psi, the illusion that the virtual...

Recent evidence supports the use of immersive virtual reality (immersive VR) as a means of applying visual feedback techniques in neurorehabilitation. In this study, we investigated the benefits of an embodiment-based immersive VR training program for orthopedic upper limb rehabilitation, with the aim of improving the motor functional ability of th...

Virtual reality (VR) affords the study of the behaviour of people in social situations that would be logistically difficult or ethically problematic in reality. The laboratory-controlled setup makes it straightforward to collect multi-modal data and compare the responses across different experimental conditions. However, the scenario is typically f...

We created a virtual reality version of a 1983 performance by Dire Straits. To understand the responses of participants we carried out two studies which used sentiment analysis of texts written by the participants. Study 1 (n = 25) (Beacco et al., 2021, Disturbance and Plausibility in a Virtual Rock Concert, IEEE Virtual Reality) had the unexpected...

Brain-computer interfacing (BCI) that reads brain activity and generates commands to control the movements of the body—real, virtual, prosthetic or robotic—can be used as a means for neurorehabilitation. BCI can be used to carry out motor actions which, being lost through the real body, bypass it and use other effectors. However, do BCI-generated b...

The proportion of the population who experience persecutory thoughts is 10–15%. People then engage in safety-seeking behaviours, typically avoiding social interactions, which prevents disconfirmatory experiences and hence paranoia persists. Here we show that persecutory thoughts can be reduced if prior to engaging in social interaction in VR partic...

The Golden Rule of ethics in its negative form states that you should not do to others what you would not want others to do to you, and in its positive form states that you should do to others as you would want them to do to you. The Golden Rule is an ethical principle, but in virtual reality (VR), it can also be thought of as a paradigm for the pr...

Virtual Reality can be used to embody people in different types of body—so that when they look towards themselves or in a mirror they will see a life-sized virtual body instead of their own, and that moves with their own movements. This will typically give rise to the illusion of body ownership over the virtual body. Previous research has focused o...

Virtual reality applications depend on multiple factors, for example, quality of rendering, responsiveness, and interfaces. In order to evaluate the relative contributions of different factors to quality of experience, post-exposure questionnaires are typically used. Questionnaires are problematic as the questions can frame how participants think a...

Traditional work on bystander intervention in violent emergencies has found that the larger the group, the less the chance that any individual will intervene. Here, we tested the impact on helping behavior of the affiliation of the bystanders with respect to the participants. We recruited 40 male supporters of the U.K. Arsenal football club for a t...

There is an alarming level of violence by police in the US towards African Americans. Although this may be rooted in explicit racial bias, the more intractable problem is overcoming implicit bias, bias that is non-conscious but demonstrated in actual behavior. If bias is implicit it is difficult to change through explicit methods that attempt to ch...

When people hold implicit biases against a group they typically engage in discriminatory behaviour against group members. In the context of the implicit racial bias of ‘White' against ‘Black' people, it has been shown several times that implicit bias is reduced after a short exposure of embodiment in a dark-skinned body in virtual reality. Embodime...

Recent behavioural studies have provided evidence that virtual reality (VR) based interventions have an impact on socio-affective processes and accumulating findings now underscore the potential of VR for therapeutic interventions. An interesting recent finding is that experiencing a violent situation as a victim in immersive VR leads to an increas...

When people hold implicit biases against a group they typically engage in discriminatory behaviour against group members. In the context of the implicit racial bias of 'White' against 'Black' people, it has been shown several times that implicit bias is reduced after a short exposure of embodiment in a dark-skinned body in virtual reality. Embodime...

As part of the open sourcing of the Microsoft Rocketbox avatar library for research and academic purposes, here we discuss the importance of rigged avatars for the Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR, AR) research community. Avatars, virtual representations of humans, are widely used in VR applications. Furthermore many research areas ranging from cr...

Previous research using immersive virtual reality (VR) has shown that after a short period of embodiment by White people in a Black virtual body, their implicit racial bias against Black people diminishes. Here we tested the effects of some socio-cognitive variables that could contribute to enhancing or reducing the implicit racial bias. The first...

Immersive virtual reality is widely used for research and clinical purposes. Here we explored the impact of an immersive virtual scene of intimate partner violence experienced from the victim’s perspective (first person), as opposed to witnessing it as an observer (third person). We are ultimately interested in the potential of this approach to reh...

Group pressure can often result in people carrying out harmful actions towards others that they would not normally carry out by themselves. However, few studies have manipulated factors that might overcome this. Here male participants (n = 60) were in a virtual reality (VR) scenario of sexual harassment (SH) of a lone woman by a group of males in a...

In this experiment, we aimed to measure the conscious internal representation of one's body appearance and allow the participants to compare this to their ideal body appearance and to their real body appearance. We created a virtual representation of the internal image participants had of their own body shape. We also created a virtual body corresp...

Changes in body representation may affect pain perception. The effect of a distorted body image, such as the telescoping effect in amputee patients, on pain perception, is unclear. This study aimed to investigate whether distorting an embodied virtual arm in virtual reality (simulating the telescoping effect in amputees) modulated pain perception a...

Would people feel guilty if their robot avatar acted autonomously to harm someone? We examined the experience of guilt during robot avatar embodiment, a form of embodiment where the participants experience the body of a humanoid robot as if it were their own. In particular, we analyzed what happens when a robot avatar spontaneously verbally abuses...

We present an experiment designed to investigate whether seeing a virtual double performing an action in a social context can impact participants' psychological state. With the help of a 3D scanning process, we are interested in exposing participants suffering from moderate paranoid thinking to a ubiquitous social situation where they see their vir...

When faced with a personal problem people typically give better advice to others than to themselves. A previous study showed how it is possible to enact internal dialogue in virtual reality (VR) through participants alternately occupying two different virtual bodies – one representing themselves and the other Sigmund Freud. They could maintain a se...

Background Virtual reality (VR) is increasingly used to study and treat psychiatric disorders. Its fidelity depends in part on the extent to which the VR environment provides a convincing simulation, for example whether a putatively stressful VR situation actually produces a stress response. Methods We studied the stress response in 28 healthy men...

Background Persecutory delusions are a major psychiatric problem and are associated with a wide range of adverse outcomes. Our theoretical model views these delusions as unfounded threat beliefs which persist due to defence behaviours (e.g. avoidance) that prevent disconfirmatory evidence being processed. The treatment implications are that patient...

When we successfully achieve willed actions, the feeling that our moving body parts belong to the self (i.e., body ownership) is barely required. However, how and to what extent the awareness of our own body contributes to the neurocognitive processes subserving actions is still debated. Here we capitalized on immersive virtual reality in order to...

In Milgram’s seminal obedience studies, participants’ behaviour has traditionally been explained as a demonstration of people’s tendency to enter into an ‘agentic state’ when in the presence of an authority figure: they attend only to the demands of that authority and are insensitive to the plight of their victims. There have been many criticisms o...

Time taken to shock. Difference between experimental conditions on the measure ‘timetoshock’. (TIFF)

Manipulation check. Explanations, items, and analysis of the questionnaire used to assess the efficacy of the priming. (Table 1) Items used to assess priming efficacy. (Table 2) Correlations for priming scores. (PDF)

Data collected from participants. (XLS)

Familiarity with computers. Box plots of responses to how familiar participants were with computer use, programming, and prior experience of VR, where 1 = Not at all and 7 = very much so. (TIFF)

Descriptive statistics of responses to the identification manipulation. Bar charts showing the means and standard errors of the combined priming questionnaire score derived from the Polychoric PCA over the questionnaire scores. (TIFF)

Program used to run the analysis. (PDF)

Visual of the Virtual Reality paradigm. A participant in the Cave faces the Learner. In Figure A the ‘Learner’ is the virtual male character wearing a ‘UCL’ sweatshirt. Behind the character are the cue word and 4 response words. The participant is seated at a desk, and his right hand is turning up the voltage on the shock machine. Figure B shows th...

Responses to the identification manipulation. Box plots of responses to the manipulation of (a) the identification with students (i.e. non-science) questionnaire and (b) the identification with science questionnaire. The medians are the thick horizontal lines and the boxes show the interquartile ranges (IQR). The whiskers extend from max (min value...

Stress measure. Items and procedural information relating to the APQ stress measure. (PDF)

Presence. Background information, items, and effect sizes of presences measures. (Table 1) The full set of presence questions and effect sizes comparing the two groups. (PDF)

Familiarity with technology. Items and effect sizes for items measuring participants experiences with gaming, computers, programming, and VR. (Table 1) Questions and their effect sizes. (PDF)

Familiarity with Milgram. Box plot showing participants’ level of familiarity with Milgram’s obedience studies across conditions. The effect size comparing Science with Non-Science is .047, indicating no difference between groups. (TIFF)

Descriptive statistics of RSPL scores. Bar chart showing mean ± SE of RSPL; (A) By the Control and Experimental (Science, Non-Science) groups (B) Distinguishing the Science and Non-Science groups. (TIFF)

Relationship between helping and stress. Scatterplot illustrating the relationship between helping and stress by experimental group. (TIFF)

Avatar script. Procedure used for randomising participants to conditions and the script followed by the avatar (i.e. the ‘Learner’). (PDF)

Familiarity with Milgram. Items measuring participants’ levels of familiarity with Milgram’s obedience studies. (PDF)

Modifying the visual aspect of a virtual arm that is felt as one's own using immersive virtual reality (VR) modifies pain threshold in healthy subjects but does it modify pain ratings in chronic pain patients? Our aim was to investigate whether varying properties of a virtual arm co-located with the real arm modulated pain ratings in patients with...

Mortality is an obvious if uncomfortable part of the human condition, yet it is impossible to study its impact on anyone who experiences it. Reports of phenomena associated with death such as out-of-the-body (OBE) and near death experiences (NDE) can only be studied post-hoc, since it is impossible to design a scientific study where an experimental...

The data set. Some individual defining characteristics such as age and religion have been removed for data protection reasons. (CSV)

Pro and anti Catalan texts used, together with the evaluation questions for both texts (Spanish). (DOCX)

Goodness of fit plots. (DOCX)

The sample—A summary of the demographic variables. (DOCX)

Responses to email sent 15 days after the final day of the experiment. (DOCX)

A virtual reality scenario called “We Wait” gives people an immersive experience of the plight of refugees waiting to be picked up by a boat on a shore in Turkey to be illegally taken to Europe, crossing a dangerous stretch of sea. This was based on BBC news reporting of the refugee situation, but deliberately depicted as an animation with cartoon-...

Virtual Reality (VR) has been widely applied to cultural heritage such as the reconstruction of ancient sites and artifacts. It has hardly been applied to the reprise of specific important moments in history. On the other hand immersive journalism does attempt to recreate current events in VR, but such applications typically give the viewer a disem...

Background: Engaging, interactive, and automated virtual reality (VR) treatments might help solve the unmet needs of individuals with mental health disorders. We tested the efficacy of an automated cognitive intervention for fear of heights guided by an avatar virtual coach (animated using motion and voice capture of an actor) in VR and delivered...

The brain's body representation is amenable to rapid change, even though we tend to think of our bodies as relatively fixed and stable. For example, it has been shown that a life-sized body perceived in virtual reality as substituting the participant's real body, can be felt as if it were their own, and that the body type can induce perceptual, att...

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has not been fixed in the paper.

This commentary briefly reviews the history of virtual reality and its use for psychology research, and clarifies the concepts of immersion and the illusion of presence.

The ability to perspective-take (cognitive awareness of another's state) and empathise (emotional/affective response) are important characteristics for sensitive, co-operative and constructive parenting, which assists in developing adaptive functioning for children. For the first time, immersive virtual reality was used to place parents in the posi...

People's mental representations of their own body are malleable and continuously updated through sensory cues. Altering one's body-representation can lead to changes in object perception and implicit attitudes. Virtual reality has been used to embody adults in the body of a 4-year-old child or a scaled-down adult body. Child embodiment was found to...

Virtual reality (VR) typically results in the illusion of presence. The participant in a VR scenario typically has the illusion of being in the virtual place, and under the right conditions the further illusion that events that are occurring there are really occurring. We review how these properties are useful for the application of VR in education...

Previous results have shown that body ownership, induced through first-person perspective (1PP) over a virtual body (VB) that moves synchronously with real body movements, can lead to illusory agency over VB utterances even though the participant does not speak. It was also found that when participants later speak they follow the fundamental freque...

Introduction: A virtual arm can be felt as your own in virtual reality (Slater et al, 2008). The modification of visual aspects of the "owned" virtual arm has been shown to modify pain threshold in healthy subjects. For example, redness of the skin decreases the heat pain threshold (Martini et al, 2013), while looking at the virtual arm increases p...

Introduction: A virtual arm can be felt as your own in virtual reality (Slater et al, 2008). The modification of visual aspects of the "owned" virtual arm has been shown to modify pain threshold in healthy subjects. For example, redness of the skin decreases the heat pain threshold (Martini et al, 2013), while looking at the virtual arm increases p...

The key question we address is whether interactivity in a virtual environment (VE) impacts conceptual learning. We developed a Virtual Reality (VR) application to simulate a playground, in which children had to engage in tasks that required solving arithmetical fractions problems. Fifty (50) children were tested in an empirical study with different...

Functional imaging studies have implicated the hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus in cue-guided spatial navigation, but also many other regions. Furthermore, little is known about de-activations that take place during performance of navigation tasks, something that is of interest given that the hippocampus is a component of the default mode netw...

People generally show greater preference for members of their own racial group compared to racial out-group members. This type of ‘in-group bias’ is evident in mimicry behaviors. We tend to automatically mimic the behaviors of in-group members, and this behavior is associated with interpersonal sensitivity and empathy. However, mimicry is reduced w...

Background data and supplementary analysis. (DOCX)

The full data set in Microsoft Excel format. (XLSX)

We report on the design and results of an experiment investigating factors influencing Slater’s Plausibility Illusion (Psi) in virtual environments. Slater proposed Psi and Place Illusion (PI) as orthogonal components of virtual experience which contribute to realistic response in a VE. PI corresponds to the traditional conception of presence as “b...