ABOUT MEL SLATER Mel Slater is an ICREA (Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats) Research Professor at the University of Barcelona. He became Professor of Virtual Environments at University College London in 1997 where he still maintains several projects and research students. In 2005 he was awarded the Virtual Reality Career Award by IEEE ( Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)Virtual Reality ‘In Recognition of Seminal Achievements in Engineering Virtual Reality.’ He leads the eventLab (Experimental Virtual Environments) at the University of Barcelona. He is Coordinator of the European Union 7th Framework Integrated Project VERE (Vereproject. org), and scientific leader of the Integrated Project BEAMING (Beaming-eu.org). He holds a European Research Council grant TRAVERSE (Traverserc.org) on the specific topic virtual embodiment, and the general topic of a new area of application of virtual reality based on this theme.
You can watch a short video of the experiment on youtube at youtube. com/watch?v=_z8pSTMfGSo. Find out more about Mel Slater and his research at event-lab.org. A list of his research publications can be found at publicationslist. org/melslater. Videos illustrating the research can be viewed at youtube.com/user/ EVENTLabBarcelona.
be yours. In all your history whenever you have looked towards yourself you’ve always seen your body – so the brain forms the reasonable hypothesis that this now must be your body – even though at a higher cognitive level you know that this is not the case. This is not a voluntarily illusion – it just happens.” Where this becomes really interesting is when the virtual body is radically different from the real one. Fat people can be given super-skinny bodies; tall people can be given short ones. Slater said that in the very early days of virtual reality, a researcher named Jaron Lanier experimented informally with this and gave himself the body of a lobster. “If you have the strong illusion that a virtual body is yours, what follows from that, especially if the virtual body is quite different from your own?” Slater said. “We have shown, for example, that when light skinned people are embodied in a dark skinned virtual body, a body that apparently substitutes their own real body, and that moves as they move, then their implicit racial bias towards dark skinned people reduces. This does not happen when they are embodied in a white body or a blue body (or no body – but otherwise seeing the same events in the virtual reality). Similarly, if people have a casual-looking body reminiscent of Jimmy Hendrix then they will spontaneously play the drums with significantly greater body movement, than if they have a formal looking light skinned body dressed in a suit.” Slater recently collaborated with Will Steptoe and Anthony Steed at University College London where they conducted an experiment on what happens when you give hu-
mans a tail. Under the appropriate synchronous multisensory conditions, the participants incorporated the tail into their body representation and carried out behaviours that were consistent with that. Also Henrik Ehrsson from Karolinska in Sweden has shown that it is possible to generate the illusion of having three arms. These studies show that the brain is incredibly malleable in its representation of the body. A few moments of stimulation can result not only in the illusion of body ownership over a mannequin body or a virtual body, but when there is a strong body ownership illusion, this can lead to other profound changes in perception and even in deep-seated implicit attitudes. Further research is necessary to ascertain how long these effects last. Slater has also been working on a project with journalist and researcher Nonny de la Peña entitled “immersive journalism.” As part of this project , people were given the experience of being in a Guantanamo-like cell standing in a stress position, while hearing someone being interrogated in the cell next door. In reality people were seated comfortably and wearing a head-mounted display. But when they looked towards themselves and also in a virtual mirror they would see that their virtual body was in a stress position. People reported feeling symptoms associated with that – for example, feeling bent over, pains in the legs and back and so on. “The idea of immersive journalism,” Slater said, “is to give people direct experiences, rather than only reading about events or seeing them on TV.” M