- Whose hand can I see? (Image: Yifei Chai)
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I KNOW I'm no longer myself when I see my own body standing beside me. What's more, when I look down, I see the body of a man. Then I lift my arms, and the other "me" moves her arms in time. It's an odd feeling.
I'm wearing an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset as part of a system developed by Yifei Chai at Imperial College London that gives you the illusion of inhabiting another body.
It is Chai's body I see where my own should be. He is standing next to me, wearing a head-mounted, twin wide-angle camera to film my body and his own. These two perspectives are sent to my headset where they are flipped – I see myself as having his body and my body appears next to me. But that's not all. My movements are being tracked by a Kinect camera. Chai is wearing a suit full of electrical stimulators that force his arms into the same position as mine. This enhances the illusion: when I look down, the movement of the body I see matches my physical movement.
When we swap roles, the tingling as my arms are moved and twisted into positions out of my control is more powerful than I imagined. It is quite unsettling (see video).
The project is inspired by the Proteus effect, a psychological phenomenon whereby a person adapts their behaviour to match a new digital persona.
Although gaming is an obvious application, Chai says his system could be used to create empathy, in a similar way that "age simulation suits" can give an idea of physical limitations as we grow older. There is also interest in the device for rehabilitation, as muscle stimulation could recreate gestures in exercise regimes.
The suit can stimulate 34 individual muscles in the arms and shoulders but there are plans to expand this. High definition versions of the Oculus Rift and Kinect will be released in September, so more muscle groups will be detected. "Using several Kinect cameras will also help recognise more movements," says Chai.
Jane Aspell of Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK, who has developed out-of-body virtual experiences, thinks the combination of components could have exciting applications. "Mental health workers could use an adapted version to virtually experience what it is like to have a mental illness," she says.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Virtual body-hack lets you be someone else"