Swedish scientists achieve virtual body swaps
p2pnet news view | Cool:- Angela Bassett and Ralph Fiennes star in Strange Days, a 1995 sci-fi movie in which body-swap ‘clients’ rent discs which, interfaced with portable headsets, allow them to experience in every sense what’s happening to someone else — even being murdered.
Virtual reality to the nth degree.
Now, neuroscientists at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute have been able to let volunteers wearing VR goggles experience the illusion of swapping bodies with a mannequin and a real person.
“We were interested in a classical question that philosophers and psychologists have discussed for centuries: why we feel that the self is in our bodies,” the Associated Press has project leader Henrik Ehrsson saying.
“To study this scientifically we’ve used tricks, perceptual illusions.
Reporter Karl Ritter had a chance to try body swapping, says the story, going on »»»
The first props I saw were two kitchen knives, three naked dummies and a prosthetic hand sticking out from behind a curtain.
“You have the right to say stop at anytime if you feel uncomfortable,” said Ehrsson’s colleague, Valeria Petkova, as she rubbed my left hand with electrolytic gel and attached electrodes to the middle and index fingers.
She assured me I was not in any danger. Still, a nervous tingle rushed through my body as she placed the headset over my eyes.
In the first experiment, the goggles were hooked up to CCTV cameras fitted to the head of a male mannequin, staring down at its feet. Through the headset I saw a grainy image of the dummy’s plastic torso. I tilted my head down to create the sensation I was looking down at my own body.
At that point, it didn’t feel very real. But when Petkova simultaneously brushed markers against my belly and that of the mannequin, the effect started setting in. As my brain processed the visual and tactile signals, I had a growing impression that the mannequin’s body was my own.
That was good fun, until the gleaming blade of a bread knife entered my field of vision. Petkova slid it across the dummy’s stomach, sending shivers down my spine and a pulse of anxiety through the electrodes. My heightened stress level was illustrated by a spike in a computer diagram shown to me after the experiment.
AP quotes Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford, as saying the Karolinska study was a “step up” from other research on the subject.
“His only concern was whether there might be any lasting effect on participants,” it adds.
In Strange Days, there’s absolutely no doubt.
It does.
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Associated Press – Body-swap illusion tricks mind in new study, December 2, 2008
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