Screenshot courtesy Electronic Arts (via Wired)
Tom over at Mind Hacks makes a few interesting observations regarding the disjunction between real and virtual selves. Referencing Clive Thompson’s Wired article, he notes that, in the video game Mirror’s Edge, “the visual cues about what your character’s arms and legs are doing (they appear in shot as you run and jump) makes the game a convincing proprioception hack.”
Elaborating on this strange effect, Tom mentions Jaron Lanier’s first VR experience with sensory-motoric disjunction in the 80s. A remarkable passage from the post to which he refers is reproduced below:
Of course there were bugs. I distinctly remember a wonderful bug that caused my hand to become enormous, like a web of flying skyscrapers. As is often the case, this accident led to an interesting discovery.
It turned out that people could quickly learn to inhabit strange and different bodies and still interact with the virtual world. I became curious how weird the body could get before the mind would become disoriented. I played around with elongated limb segments, and strange limb placement. The most curious experiment involved a virtual lobster (which was lovingly modeled by Ann Lasko.) A lobster has a trio of little midriff arms on each side of its body. If physical human bodies sprouted corresponding limbs, we would have measured them with an appropriate body suit and that would have been that.
I assume it will not come as a surprise to the reader that the human body does not include these little arms, so the question arose of how to control them. The answer was to extract a little influence from each of many parts of the physical body and merge these data streams into a single control signal for a given joint in the extra lobster limbs. A touch of human elbow twist, a dash of human knee flex; a dozen such movements might be mixed to control the middle join of little left limb #3. The result was that the principle elbows and knees could still control their virtual counterparts roughly as before, while still contributing to the control of additional limbs.
Yes, it turns out people can learn to control bodies with extra limbs!
I find this moment in the history of virtual reality especially important (–a good deal of my dissertation focuses on it). It can be compared to Frank Biocca’s experiments (for the military) where the displacement of vision by head-mounted see-through visors caused discrepancies in the hand-eye coordination of the user. Though this disjunction at first induced simulation sickness, afterwards, much to the surprise of the experimenters, the subject rather quickly adapted to the new proprioceptive coordinates. (See, for instance, his 1998 Presence paper, “Virtual Eyes Can Rearrange Your Body: Adaptation to Visual Displacement in See-Through, Head-Mounted Displays”.)
This shift in the goals or possibilities of immersion was somewhat unintended, however. (For some time Biocca considered sensory disjunction a problem to be solved with better technology, and Lanier attributes the discovery of these possibilities to a ‘bug’.) In any event, the experimental pursuit of these virtual body effects has changed the development of virtual reality technologies considerably: for one, VR is no longer simply thought of as consigned to reproduce or mimic the real world body of the user — which has led to an equally radical shift in conceptions of the self, the body, and its (physiological) limitations. (One can even discern a new techno-spiritualism emerging alongside these discoveries. To be sure, the opening-up of new possibilities for bodily experience has brought with it a powerful rhetoric of freedom from the body.)
