The VR illusion that makes you think you have a spider’s body
July 29, 2019 5:39 PM   Subscribe

The next big thing in gaming could be using VR to believably inhabit non-humanoid bodies:
Virtual reality offers the unique possibility to experience a virtual representation as our own body. In contrast to previous research that predominantly studied this phenomenon for humanoid avatars, our work focuses on virtual animals. In this paper, we discuss different body tracking approaches to control creatures such as spiders or bats and the respective virtual body ownership effects.
posted by Johnny Wallflower (23 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
Decades ago I read something in The Mind’s I (the Hofstadter ‘n’ Dennett-edited collection on the nature of the self) about how you cannot imagine what it is like to, say, be a bat. Sure, you may imagine flying around at night, navigating by listening to your screeches bouncing off obstacles, and eating insects on the wing, but you are only imagining what it is like for you to be a bat. Bats experience these things entirely differently.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:47 PM on July 29, 2019 [9 favorites]


but you are only imagining what it is like for you to be a bat

honestly this is also true of other people -- minds are individually unique in both their structured bits and their messiness. it's a key thing about empathy that the understanding you gain of others is necessarily conditional to your own experience

but of course empathy is still essential even as an imperfect process, and VR not-a-human experiences still sound completely fascinating to me. they could also help test (at a basic level and not provably so) faulty assumptions about how/why other animals work the way they do by forcing you to play it out in practice.
posted by Kybard at 5:51 PM on July 29, 2019 [11 favorites]


We got a taste of this in David Byrne and Mala Gaonkar's "Neurosociety" in Menlo Park a couple of years ago. Wired has a quick video summary, with a long pre-roll ad (cw: droll turkey heads home from the beach in a vehicle), at about 40 seconds in.

We wore VR goggles, and our image was from cameras mounted on top of a doll's neck; we were posed the way the doll was posed and when we looked down instead of seeing our own body we saw the doll's body. Pretty wild.
posted by stevil at 5:57 PM on July 29, 2019 [4 favorites]


This is leading up to a Ted Cruz VR Simulator, right?

Kill this project with fire if so.
posted by delfin at 6:06 PM on July 29, 2019


spiderbaby
posted by Pastor of Muppets at 6:07 PM on July 29, 2019


One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his Oculus Rift headset a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 6:10 PM on July 29, 2019 [30 favorites]


Seeing through the eyes of a (non-human) animal is drastically different from experiencing the reality of an animal’s life. I thought the book Inside of a Dog was fascinating in describing this.
posted by sallybrown at 6:38 PM on July 29, 2019 [1 favorite]


The rubber hand illusion is an impressive dinner party trick. It persuades an unwitting guest that a rubber hand on the table is actually his or her own. For the victim, the illusion is rapid, dramatic, and convincing—the person “feels” the hand and experiences it being stroked.
I really want to know what kind of dinner parties involve the host busting out a rubber hand+arm.
posted by CrystalDave at 7:08 PM on July 29, 2019 [3 favorites]


It does sound pretty amazing -- so amazing that I can almost see it being more popular than a sex simulator...briefly. About an hour after that, somebody will try having sex with a giant spider. Then they'll put wings on the spider. Then boobs. I'm pretty sure within a week we're all just in some kinda David Cronenberg VR orgy, and about a week after that everyone is dead of dehydration. Goodbye, everybody
posted by kittens for breakfast at 7:10 PM on July 29, 2019 [11 favorites]


what kind of dinner parties involve the host busting out a rubber hand+arm.

The kind I wish I was invited to I tell you what.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:12 PM on July 29, 2019 [6 favorites]


Just as long as nobody forces me to doppel into an anteater.
posted by Strange Interlude at 7:38 PM on July 29, 2019 [3 favorites]


Jaron Lanier, who founded the very first VR headset company back in 1983 (before becoming the tech world's preëminent curmudgeon) wanted to use VR to turn people into squids. He talks more about cephalopods in this interview and this magazine article:
As a researcher who studies virtual reality, I can tell you exactly what emotion floods through me when I watch cephalopods morph: jealousy. Virtual reality, an immersive computer-graphics environment that a human can "enter" and then morph himself into various things, is a pale approximation of the experience. You can have a virtual body, or avatar, and do things like examine your hands or watch yourself in a virtual mirror. Some of the earliest experimental avatars in fact were aquatic, including one that allowed a person to inhabit a lobster's body.

The problem is that in order to morph, humans must design avatars in laborious detail in advance. Our software tools are not yet flexible enough to enable us, in virtual reality, to think ourselves into different forms.
In his book You Are Not a Gadget, one of his main sources of personal disillusionment was that VR development turned away from this sort of conciousness-expanding research.
posted by mbrubeck at 7:52 PM on July 29, 2019 [9 favorites]


Count me in! People meditate for years to be able to shift minds eye perspective like this. We are figments of our own creation anyways.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 8:11 PM on July 29, 2019


>>what kind of dinner parties involve the host busting out a rubber hand+arm.
>The kind I wish I was invited to I tell you what.


An old party trick I learned: if there doesn't seem to be the kind of event that you'd like to go to, you won't be the only one, so host it yourself and make it happen! (and/or gather some like-minded people to help so it's not so much work) ;)
posted by anonymisc at 8:21 PM on July 29, 2019 [1 favorite]


I'm pretty sure within a week we're all just in some kinda David Cronenberg VR orgy, and about a week after that everyone is dead of dehydration. Goodbye, everybody

Flagged as Gloom And Doom.

(Can this thing simulate opposite-sex genitals? Asking for a friend!)
posted by The Toad at 9:01 PM on July 29, 2019 [2 favorites]


This is what entheogens are for. I did a bit of salvia one time, and stood up to go get some water, and I'm quite sure my back legs stayed next to the couch while my torso and arms went to the kitchen, connected with a big slinky like that dog toy.

VR has been around for a long time.
posted by vrakatar at 9:10 PM on July 29, 2019 [2 favorites]


I thought the book Inside of a Dog was fascinating in describing this.

That this is actually a book is fascinating to me. Because outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

-Groucho Marx
posted by hippybear at 9:13 PM on July 29, 2019 [2 favorites]


We are figments of our own creation anyways.

We are computers made of meat trapped in bone jars driving robots made of calcium and meat which feed what we think are our sensors for information about the world around us.
posted by hippybear at 9:16 PM on July 29, 2019 [3 favorites]



We are computers made of meat trapped in bone jars driving robots made of calcium and meat which feed what we think are our sensors for information about the world around us.


mrrrrow. helooooo sexy!
posted by lalochezia at 2:12 AM on July 30, 2019 [4 favorites]


Isn't this basically the plot to Overdrawn at the Memory Bank?

Fingle don't doppel.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:10 AM on July 30, 2019 [2 favorites]


Decades ago I read something in The Mind’s I (the Hofstadter ‘n’ Dennett-edited collection on the nature of the self) about how you cannot imagine what it is like to, say, be a bat.

It’s a somewhat famous article in the field of theory of mind:

What Is It Like to Be a Bat? by Thomas Nagel (pdf, wiki)
posted by dephlogisticated at 6:25 AM on July 30, 2019


And then there's Kathleen Akins' classic response to Nagel: "What is it Like to be Boring and Myopic?" (pdf)

I particularly like this bit, about how echolocating bats don't bother with seeing, for example, a bug that's flying faster than them:

"Because Doppler compensation in the bat occurs only in one direction (the bat lowers its voice but never raises it) objects moving away from the bat will produce echoes that are well below 61 kHz... This means that the echo will fall in a frequency range to which the basilar membrane (the "receiver") is least sensitive, so objects that move away from the bat will simply disappear. Indeed, the faster the object moves away from the bat, the more quickly it will "evaporate". (Consider how odd our experience would be if human vision had an analogous mechanism. Imagine standing by the side of the road watching cars go by. The car comes towards you, getting bigger and bigger, but when it passes, the car almost instantly vanishes! Cyclists, however, take a little longer to disappear while pedestrians simply fade slowly away.) Unlike for us, however, this mechanism makes sense in the bat because the sonar system is used primarily during flight. It is always flying forward, directing the sonar signal in a small beam ahead of itself, towards the objects in its path. Hence, most objects will have a positive relative velocity and be potentially "visible"."
posted by cnidaria at 6:45 AM on July 30, 2019 [2 favorites]


Fingle don't doppel.

Mom! My nuts?
posted by Faint of Butt at 12:04 PM on July 30, 2019


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