By Aijing Cao, Junior Project Manager - Art-Science
In occasion of the stunning presence of the underwater experience "Paradise Lost" by Birdly at the 13th Shanghai Biennale from May 15 to June 1, Swissnex in China continued to delve deep into the topic of Virtual Reality (VR) with two VR insiders Bruno Herbelin, Scientist from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), and Max Rheiner, CEO and Founder of SOMNIACS AG / Birdly to have the Art x Science Dialogues on the “Ultimate Dream of VR”.
Putting aside the fact of motion sickness and the current technological limitations, we’ve seen a growing market demand with applications in the business field, the increasing consumer base and the optimized quality of VR games. These have brought a hopeful signal to the industry as the next computing platform. However, before getting overwhelmed by the giant potential market and promising future, it is essential for us to understand the mechanism of bodily self-consciousness.
Scientist Bruno Herbelin elaborated the basis for comprehending VR in cognitive neuroscience and experimental psychology with step-by-step explanation of various classic studies, such as the Rubber hand illusion, the Enforcement illusion, the Virtual mirror and the Virtual out-of-body experience. It was fascinating to know about the scientific fact that our body temperature would decrease and have an analgesia effect, after identification with an avatar in the VR headset. Immersion in VR is all the technologies that would replace the real world with the virtual world, namely, replacing your sensation by using your body as the interface to create displacement in your head. With abundant proofs from the empirical studies, it is found out that the first-person view with external multisensory experience can build up the illusion of embodiment and capturing your own body being present can modulate episodic memory. Following this principle, VR with avatar-sync can better allow participants to experience disembodiment or re-embodiment into other bodies. For instance, participants’ embodiment in a Black avatar can reduce implicit racial bias within just a few minutes. These remarkable findings have paved the way for further experiments and studies to improve the embodiment and disembodiment in the VR world.
A perfect example to elaborate Bruno’s presentation is Birdly, the VR flying simulator. The novel immersive experience of bodily embodiment as a sea turtle to swim deep in the oceans successfully puts us in the shoes of undersea creatures, to raise empathy for the ocean, witness the devastating pollution caused by humans, and the urgency of marine conservation. Max Rheiner, the man behind the Birdly, emphasized that experience is a close combination of hardware and software, and even the slightest incoordination would lead to the illusion break. Furthermore, design thinking enabled Max to mix total free-roaming experience with storytelling to bring down climate change in a smooth and linear story flow. What’s more, Max unraveled a few concept drawings of the latest gliding experience from the top of the Swiss mountain — “Skyfall — a Wingsuit Experience”.
In the Q&A session, Max expressed his openness to extend Birdly to full-body embodiment with a multisensory experience. However, at this stage, adding more sensors and activators would increase the setting up complexity dramatically. On the other side, the new “Skyfall — a Wingsuit Experience” would go about the social aspects through racing and gaming functions. In addition, Bruno stated that VR utilization in healthcare needs to be discussed and applied in a case-by-case approach. Besides that, VR has been considered a tool for medical professionals; it needs to be firmly pushed forward to patients to bring out potential psychological benefits. Moreover, VR has already been experimented to alleviate the breathlessness problem caused by COVID-19 and other respiratory illnesses.
Due to the time constraint, we could only take a limited number of questions. If you have further questions for our speakers regarding VR, please email us at artscience@swissnexchina.org. We will try our best to forward them to the speakers.
Click here to watch the recording.