Are We Already Living in Virtual Reality?
July 13, 2018 7:53 AM   Subscribe

In 2005, Metzinger put on a virtual-reality head-mounted display. Inside, he saw his own body, facing away from him, standing in a room. He watched as Lenggenhager stroked its back. Metzinger could feel the stroking, but the body to which it was happening seemed to be situated in front of him. He felt a strange sensation, as though he were drifting in space, or being stretched between the two bodies. He wanted to jump entirely into the body before him, but couldn’t. He seemed marooned outside of himself. It wasn’t quite an out-of-body experience, but it was proof that, using computer technology, the self-model could easily be manipulated. A new area of research had been created: virtual embodiment. [slnewyorker] [via radiolab] [previously]
posted by destrius (17 comments total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
Jamiroquai is concerned about the ramifications.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 8:30 AM on July 13, 2018 [11 favorites]


That sounds like a really interesting experience and I would love to try it.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 8:46 AM on July 13, 2018 [7 favorites]


Cue scene from City of Lost Children.
posted by ian1977 at 9:04 AM on July 13, 2018 [1 favorite]


DOesn't this depend on the viewer having a sense of sight to be "fooled," into perceiving this thing? I feel like a lot of the "hype," around VR and so forth passes me by completely because it has generally been visual, or at best visual/auditory. I know intellectually that it's pretty cool, but my blind brain is like, meh.
posted by Alensin at 9:06 AM on July 13, 2018 [11 favorites]


Are there games/simulations available for existing, off the shelf VR headsets, that one can try today to experience the kinds of "O.B.E." that the article describes? Thank you!
posted by vert canard at 9:12 AM on July 13, 2018 [2 favorites]


Alensin, VR is primarily visual for sure. I can only guess at how you experience embodiment, since I'm not blind myself (nor do I live in your body!), but I am a VR designer and I could take an educated stab at how I might cast the same disembodiment illusions for you that they're talking about in the article.

First of all, I'm assuming your personal feeling of embodiment still exists, even though your sense of sight is different than mine. Everyone creates a mental model of where their body is located in space, the dimensions of that body, and how that body feels when it moves through space. For you, I could guess that your senses of hearing and touch play a pivotal role in your mental model of your physical self, so I'd make a simulated experience for you that plays with audio and haptic inputs, manipulating your senses of hearing and touch to try to create the illusion of changing the dimensions or location of your physical self in ways you don't naturally experience. Growing rapidly in size, alternating between two different locations in the same "room", stuff like that.

I don't actually know of anyone working on something like that, but that would be my instinct. And it would require a lot of trial and error, since you would be the only person who could reliably report on your experience and whether the illusion is working or not. But I truly believe it could be done, and using the same approach, folks like you could have simulated experiences with the same level of sophistication and fidelity that we can produce visually.

As far as audio goes, there are some companies working very hard on 3D/spatial audio that takes physics into account to help accurately simulate aural experiences. But for the haptics side, the sophistication just isn't there yet, either. We don't have the ability to simulate a wide range of tactile sensations to reliably recreate the physical experiences our bodies have constantly, so right now we rely very heavily on the visual/audio sensory inputs to create an incomplete image of simulated experiences for human brains. It's really a combination of your brain's capacity for gestalt and crossing our fingers that we've provide enough input to trick your brain into accepting what you're experiencing as real, or maybe "real enough".

I was on a panel about haptics for VR & AR at a conference recently with four different haptics hardware companies and we discussed this exact limitation (of the hardware) with respect to the simulations and experiences people are making right now. There are a lot of hardware hurdles to jump over, but if there's a need, it'll happen eventually.
posted by Snacks at 9:54 AM on July 13, 2018 [12 favorites]


As an addendum to what's above, the most interesting part to me is that you have to provide context of the environment you're "in" in order to be able to play with embodiment. You need to know where you are and in relation to what else is around you in order to know whether you're you or not. Fun stuff! :)
posted by Snacks at 9:58 AM on July 13, 2018 [3 favorites]


The body transfer illusion doesn't require virtual reality. What it does require is another person to do the touching. This is just the classic rubber hand trick made a bit more extreme by shifting the user's visual location out of their own (apparent) head.
posted by heatherlogan at 10:09 AM on July 13, 2018 [2 favorites]


Greg Egan has a pretty good story called "Seeing" (collected in Axiomatic) about a guy who gets brain damage that causes a persistent hallucination that he is seeing himself in 3rd person - a bird's eye view from above.
posted by straight at 10:16 AM on July 13, 2018 [3 favorites]


Oh man, I wonder if this could be helpful — or harmful — to various trauma therapies that deal with various dissociative symptoms. Or chronic pain! Off to read the article, but this is fascinating.
posted by schadenfrau at 10:21 AM on July 13, 2018


I'm not sure I understand how this is different from watching myself scratch my head in the mirror. Or watching someone else do it for me.
posted by simra at 10:37 AM on July 13, 2018


I get that this is a serious article, but some of the claims and quotes are so bombastic that I found myself occasionally experiencing website-disassociation and thinking I was on McSweeney's.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 12:47 PM on July 13, 2018


A few decades ago in Wisconsin I attended the Milwaukee Art Museum (I believe) during a showing of media art; lots of moving things, electronic things, CRT-based things.

While there, I wandered into an isolated exhibit: a room, with a chair with the back towards the room entrance, headphones attached to the chair, and a TV monitor facing the chair.

I sat down, put on the headphones, and watched the monitor. On the screen, another gentleman -- who looked nothing like me -- sat in the same chair, wearing the same headphones, in the same room, staring at me. In the headphones, I could hear a faint static, but nothing more. Over the gentleman's shoulder, I could see the entrance to his room, a mirror of mine, with out-of-focus people occasionally walking past.

So I waited, and I watched, and he waited, and he watched, and the headphone noises ebbed and flowed, lulling me into a relaxed state, and occasionally I glimpsed a passer-by, but mostly I watched the man, who looked to be as relaxed as I was becoming.

Then, over his shoulder, someone out of focus entered the room, walked quickly up behind him, and just as I started feeling like I should look over my own shoulder, because I felt like that person was actually coming up behind me, that still-out-of-focus person hit him in the back of the head with some large hammer-like thing and at that moment a loud BANG sounded in the headphones.

When I was done having a goddamn heart attack and looking over my shoulder for a person that wasn't there, I realized I was rubbing the back of my head and had completely succumbed to the idea that I was looking in a mirror instead of a monitor.

It was pretty great.
posted by davejay at 5:00 PM on July 13, 2018 [12 favorites]


Society of the Spectacles.
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 7:52 PM on July 13, 2018


So, strange bit of consilience here. This is an effect that's long been exploited by the Church of Scientology as evidence in support of their beliefs. They call it "going exterior". Typically they use a trigger phrase "be three feet in back of your head".
posted by scalefree at 1:17 AM on July 14, 2018 [2 favorites]


Great article. Combined with some of the stuff I remember from a Radiolab or NPR story that dealt more directly with the illusion of free will or agency, life starts to make a lot more sense. It's kind of exciting, to be able to test and realize that we aren't what we have to tell ourselves we are. I would love to experience this VR trick at least once, more generally it seems like this tech could be helpful in a great many avenues.
posted by GoblinHoney at 1:52 PM on July 16, 2018


Years ago I was waiting at a bus terminal and spotted a woman in a bus window who looked exactly like me. Part of my brain thought she *was* me. It was the strangest feeling, like my consciousness was floating around outside of the bus watching my body drive away. I'm not sure if I want to experience that again.

Eerily enough, this precisely describes a pivotal scene in the excellent film "The Double Life of Véronique", which itself has a lot to say about embodiment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EecLJK4eI4Y
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 12:53 PM on July 17, 2018


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