Poster Statement

Keywords: Simulation, interactivity, avatar, virtual reality, symbiosis, hybridation, self recognition, embodied cognition, technology, device.

Innovative virtual technologies foreshadow new ways of discovering worlds through simulations as well as new forms of interaction. New virtuals societies and spaces, populated by hybrid beings associating human beings and digital entities in which they will be able to incarnate, bring us a new form of bodily and cognitive symbiosis and of inter-dependence which pushes us to ask ourselves and push us to wonder how we will manage to exist and last in these new worlds that we simulate. The use of the avatar represented in the 3rd person, as a point of view and a vector of embodiment and immersion, has many advantages when evolving in a virtual environment. The external point of view offers a better perception of the environment allowing the development of new use cases for the production of VR applications. Also, an avatar allows us to obtain visual feedback and a cognitive analysis of the actions we perform in the virtual world. This form of avatarization allows the materialization of the double of oneself, being able to make the self-image evolve, thanks to the mirror neurons (Rizzolatti & al., 2006), by linking perception and action (Berthoz, 2004, 2005)

• Kevin Beaufils (FR) is researcher at the Human and Artificial Cognition Lab (CHArt). He has a master’s degree in Cognitive Psychology from Paris 8 University, France, where he is currently completing a PhD funded by the Department of Cognition, Language, and Interaction, and he teaches in the Department of Psychology. Kevin Beaufils specializes in the fields of immersive virtual reality and avatarial relationships as part of his dissertation: Cognitive Transfer and the Cognitive-Sensory Relationship between Humans and Avatars in Virtual Reality [Étude du transfert cognitif et de la relation cognitivosensorielle entre humain et avatar en réalité virtuelle], supervised by C. Tijus and E. A. Amato. From 2018 to 2020, he designed a research and outreach platform in relation with the project “Become an Avatar,” presented at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie in Paris. More recently, he has been supervising an experimental research platform in connection with the same program at Campus Condorcet, Aubervilliers.