Player/Avatar Body Relations in Multimodal Augmented Reality Games

Augmented reality research is finally moving towards multimodal experiences: more and more applications do not only include visuals, but also audio and even haptics. The purpose of multimodality in these applications can be to increase realism or to increase the amount or quality of communicated information. One particularly interesting and increasingly important application area is AR gaming, where the player can experience the virtual game integrated into the real environment and interact with it in a multimodal fashion. Currently, many games are set up such that the interaction is local (direct), however there are many cases in which remote (indirect) interaction will be useful or even necessary. In the latter case, the actions can be expressed through a virtual avatar, while the player's real body is also still perceivably present. The player then controls the motions and actions of the avatar, and receives multimodal feedback associated to the events occurring in the game. Can it be that the player starts to perceive the avatar as a (part of) him- or herself? Or does something even more intense take place? What are the benefits of this experience? The core of this research is to understand how multimodal perceptual configuration plays a role in the relation between a player and their in-game avatar.