Tomato Presence: Virtual Hand Ownership with a Disappearing Hand

Tomato presence is a term coined by Owlchemy Labs to refer to the observation that players of their game Job Simulator can experience ‘hand presence’ over an object that is not their hand. When playing the game, if a player grabs an object, their virtual hand disappears leaving the grabbed object. While players still observe a direct proprioceptive match between their hand movements and the object being manipulated, it seems that there should be a conflict with current theories of how users might react to visual/proprioceptive mismatch of their embodiment. We run a hand ownership experiment where we implement standard object grasp and the disappearing hand grasp. We show that on a body-ownership questionnaire there is evidence to support the notion that users still feel ownership over a virtual hand even though it is periodically disappearing. We also confirm that most users do not report that their hand disappeared.