Avatar Gender and Skin-Color Incongruence in Young Chinese Male Users: A Dimension-Specific Study of Embodiment in a VR Rhythm Boxing Exergame

Virtual reality (VR) lets users act through avatars, shaping how they feel and perform. Prior work on avatar gender and skin color mismatch reports inconsistent effects on sense of embodiment (SoE). We revisit this question by separating SoE into body ownership and agency and testing mismatch effects among young Chinese male users in a VR rhythm boxing game. In a 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment, we manipulated avatar gender and skin color. Results revealed that body ownership was unaffected by either mismatch, whereas agency was higher for both gender-matched and skin-matched avatars. Together, our findings show that, within this culturally situated sample and task context, avatar identity cues do not uniformly “reduce embodiment.” Rather, their effects depend on how embodiment is decomposed into distinct dimensions, how tasks foreground different perceptual and motor demands, and how avatar features are interpreted by users within specific cultural and interactional contexts.