This course will introduce you to Virtual Reality (VR). The course will teach you everything from the basics of VR- the hardware and the history of VR- to different applications of VR, the psychology of Virtual Reality, and the challenges of the medium. The course is designed for people who are new to VR as a medium. You may have experienced some virtual reality before, and may have some hardware- but this course is suitable to individuals who have never experienced VR and those who do not have much hardware- we will explain Mobile VR as well as devices such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Introduction to Virtual Reality is the first course in the Virtual Reality Specialisation. A learner with no previous experience in Virtual Reality and/or game programming will be able to evaluate existing VR applications, and design, test, and implement their own VR experiences/games using Unity by the end of the specialisation.
Psychological Effects of Embodiment Illusion
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From the course by University of London
Introduction to Virtual Reality
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From the lesson
The Psychology of VR: the Three Illusions
In this week, Professor Mel Slater will take us through the Three Illusions. We’ll discuss Place Illusion, Plausibility Illusion, and Embodiment Illusion, with some interesting tricks along the way!
Meet the Instructors
Dr Sylvia Xueni PanLecturer, Department of Computing
Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr Marco GilliesSenior Lecturer
Computing Department, Goldsmiths, University of London
[MUSIC]
So after watching and trying all these fascinating illusions yourself,
I think it will be great if we can talk about this illusion with a psychologist.
So here I'm very proud to introduce Harry, a ex-colleague and
friend who have agreed to come here and talk about this.
Harry, would you like to introduce yourself?
>> Thanks, Sylvia, so I'm Dr. Harry Farmer.
And I'm a researcher in social neuroscience at UCL's Institute of
Cognitive Neuroscience.
>> Yeah, so Harry, can you tell us a bit about rubber hand illusion and illusion,
which is two illusions the students have just tried?
>> Yes, sure, so I guess a nice way to think about how these illusions actually
work, in terms of how this match between what we see and what we feel on our skin,
creates this sense of body is to think of it in a framework where the brain
is constantly trying to predict the sensory stimuli and it's coming in.
And work out what's going on in the real world.
The brain doesn't actually have access to knowing what's part of our bodies or
not by some sort of internal thing.
It can only rely on the signals it's getting from the different senses.
And how these illusions work is basically in that you match
up the incoming tactile sensations from the paintbrush on
the skin with the visual sensations that are coming from your eyes.
And normally in the real world,
that's going to be a pretty good indicator of what's part of me and what isn't.
So if I can feel something and I can see a hand being touched that's all so
feeling that, that's probably my hand, right?
So in these illusions, what we do is create these very special
situation in which, even though those two things are matching up,
the objects being touched are totally different.
So the touch I'm feeling on my hand's obviously on my real hand.
The touch I'm seeing's on the rubber hand in front of me.
So here we create this sort of weird correlation in the signals
coming into the brain.
And to use a kind of loose phrasing,
the brain essentially takes in all this information.
And decides the most sensible way this could be working in the world is for
this hand you're seeing to definitely be part of your body.
So we have the kind of vision overrides the other senses,
such as proprioception and where your hand is in space, and
fixates that this new hand is part of your body.
And once you've done that, you get various interesting effects,
where this new prediction or model of the world, where this hand is probably,
starts to change our other senses and how we process that information.
So one of the biggest measures, or most effective sort of behavioral measures
of the illusion for the rubber hand is the feeling of proprioceptive drift.
So proprioception's the sense of where our body is in space.
So I can close my eyes but I know my hand's right here.
Yeah, I don't have to see it,
I could just kind of feel where it is from the position of all my muscles and joints.
Proprioceptive drift in the illusion is basically you started the illustration
before the stroking's happened.
You cover up both the rubber hand and their real hand, and
ask them to just point to where they think their real hand is, or guess sort of.
And if you then do the illusion with synchronous stroking,
hopefully they will feel like the hand's part of their body.
And then you ask them again where they think their hand is.
So if their hand's here, the rubber hand's here.
You'll get a shift in where they think the hand is to
normally some where in the middle.
So this sort of visual signal and
this processing of the rubber hand as part of a body then changes how we perceive our
real hand's location in space in an entirely different sensory modality.
>> Right, so it's really useful in terms of comparing,
to try to understand our relationship with our own body.
And how does that then have implications in our self-confidence,
our self-identity, and all these kind of attitude related,
[INAUDIBLE] higher-level research problems.
>> Yeah, yes, and also lower level things like how are different senses combined and
what senses inform our senses of the ownership.
So we can see how there's vision, tactile sensation.
But there's also stuff like proprioception,
which is changed by the combination vision and tactile perception.
>> Yeah, and I guess why you need this application, I can think about is to then
use to answer we can gather from these kind of experiments to help people with
some kind of neurological disorders to understand what could have gone wrong.
And how do we sort of help them to rehabilitate their abilities.
>> Yes, there's a lot of interest in this work for people who are designing
prosthetics, also artificial limbs for people who've lost them.
>> So as a psychologist, just using kind of physical problems you have,
can you do something else other than rub a hand illusion or
the illusion where we have the ownership illusion of somebody else hand or nose.
Is there any other body part we can let our participant to embody?
>> So it seems like there definitely are.
It seems like actually you could probably do it with pretty much any body part.
And so people have done rubber foot illusions.
>> Of course.
>> Legs, probably the most interesting in terms of my research in social
neuroscience and social cognition is what's called the effacement illusion.
So that's essentially if we were doing it now, we'd sit here and
you have to match up the cheeks.
But we'd have like two paintbrushes or two little Q-tips and
we'd stroke each cheek in symphony.
>> [LAUGH] >> It's not as strong as the rubber hand
illusion.
In that illusion people would normally feel very strongly in this hand's
part of your body.
Because face is a far more distinct and we probably know what our own face looks like
and then identify it from reasoning, we cannot identify our own hands.
>> Interesting, so that's a lot of interesting things going on in psychology
about this embodiment illusion.
And now we have both you and Mel here.
Maybe we can have a little discussion about from your perspective how do
you think VR could kind of help in terms of embodiment illusion?
>> So I think Mel's work has been really important in showing how
far this VR cams would be helpful in looking at body perception.
>> Mm-hm.
>> And embodiments and social factors as well.
I guess one of the big things VR adds is in these traditional illusions you
know you have this rubber and and it sits on the table.
So as soon as a person moves, that's totally broken or pretty broken pretty
quickly, and they will no longer feel that the hand's a part of their body.
Whereas in VR using motion tracking, then you can really get
a much fuller visual motor illusion where the person moves.
And they can see this body in the virtual world, moving in sync with them and
doing what they want it to.
And I think sending those kind of motor signals out there and
motor commands, and having the body respond to generally probably it
creates a stronger illusion and a more adaptable one.
>> Yes, it basically gives you flexibility in the sense that you can
make the virtual body or the virtual body parts do whatever you want.
So you can program them to move with a person, or not move with a person,
to move synchronously, asynchronously.
The person can move their right arm, and the left virtual arm might move.
Many different things there are possible, but
very difficult to do and clumsy to do with physical props.
>> Okay, so we'll talk more about VR and embodiment illusion the rest of the type
of video clips, but for now thanks very much, Harry.
>> Thanks. >> Really nice to see you.
>> Thanks, nice to see you.
>> Thanks, Mel.
[MUSIC]
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