Author: Steph Yin / Source: New York Times
How connected are your body and your consciousness?
When Michiteru Kitazaki, a professor of engineering at Toyohashi University of Technology in Japan, recently posed this question in an email, he evoked an idea from Japanese culture known as tamashii, or the soul without a body.
Will it soon be possible, he wondered, to simulate the feeling of a spirit not attached to any particular physical form using virtual or augmented reality?
If so, a good place to start would be to figure out the minimal amount of body we need to feel a sense of self, especially in digital environments where more and more people may find themselves for work or play. It might be as little as a pair of hands and feet, report Dr. Kitazaki and a Ph.D. student, Ryota Kondo.
In a paper published Tuesday in Scientific Reports, they showed that animating virtual hands and feet alone is enough to make people feel their sense of body drift toward an invisible avatar.
Their work fits into a corpus of research on illusory body ownership, which has challenged understandings of perception and contributed to therapies like treating pain for amputees who experience phantom limb.
The original body ownership trick was the rubber-hand illusion. In the 1990s, researchers found that if they hid a person’s actual hand behind a partition, placed a rubber hand in view next to it and repeatedly tapped and stroked the real and fake hand in synchrony, the subject would soon eerily start to feel sensation in the rubber hand.
Today, technologists working on virtual reality are using modern-day riffs on the rubber-hand illusion to understand how users will…
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