How can we pro­vide humans with a believ­able sen­sa­tion of being in and moving through computer-generated envi­ron­ments (like VR, com­puter games, or movies) with­out the need for costly and cum­ber­some motion plat­forms or large free-space walk­ing areas? That is, how can we “cheat intel­li­gently” by pro­vid­ing a com­pelling, embod­ied self-motion illu­sion (“vec­tion”) with­out the need for full phys­i­cal motion?

In a series of exper­i­ments, we inves­ti­gated the con­tri­bu­tion and inter­ac­tion of dif­fer­ent sen­sory modal­i­ties as well as higher-level, cog­ni­tive influences.

Below is a selec­tion of such work [more will come as the web­site evolves]

Spatialized Sound Enhances Biomechanically-Induced Self-Motion Illusion (Vection)

The use of vec­tion, the illu­sion of self-movement, has recently been explored as a novel way to immerse observers in medi­ated envi­ron­ments through illu­sory yet com­pelling self-motion with­out phys­i­cally moving. This pro­vides advan­tages over exist­ing sys­tems that employ costly, cum­ber­some, and poten­tially haz­ardous motion plat­forms, which are often sur­pris­ingly inad­e­quate to pro­vide life-like motion expe­ri­ences. This study inves­ti­gates whether spa­tial­ized sound rotat­ing around the sta­tion­ary, blind­folded lis­tener can facil­i­tate bio­me­chan­i­cal vec­tion, the illu­sion of self-rotation induced by step­ping along a rotat­ing floor plate. For the first time, inte­grat­ing simple audi­tory and bio­me­chan­i­cal cues for turn­ing in place evoked con­vinc­ing cir­cu­lar vec­tion. In an audi­tory base­line con­di­tion, par­tic­i­pants expe­ri­enced only spa­tial­ized audi­tory cues. In a purely bio­me­chan­i­cal con­di­tion, seated par­tic­i­pants stepped along side­ways on a rotat­ing plate while lis­ten­ing to mono mask­ing sounds. Scores of the bi-modal con­di­tion (bin­au­ral bio­me­chan­i­cal cues) exceeded the sum of both single cue con­di­tions, which may imply super-additive or syn­er­gis­tic effects.

Stepping along a rotat­ing cir­cu­lar tread­mill while being blind­folded can (after a few sec­onds) create a com­pelling & embod­ied illu­sion of rotat­ing in the oppo­site direc­tion[ERROR: No URL was passed to the generic video BBCode]. Studying such “biomechnically-induced cir­cu­lar vec­tion” can help us to  better under­stand human multi-modal infor­ma­tion pro­cess­ing and even­tu­ally help us to improve motion sim­u­la­tion in Virtual Reality.

First demo of our new cir­cu­lar tread­mill in the iSpace lab. Since then the setup has had some major updates.

Why not build an omni-directional tread­mill so people can walk in all direc­tion in the Virtual Environment? While recent progress has been amaz­ing, such omni-directional tread­mills are still huge, loud, expen­sive, and need many safety mea­sures (see video below for an exam­ple from the Cyberwalk project). In addi­tion, it seems that walking-in-place can only reli­ably induce cir­cu­lar vec­tion, but not translational/linear vec­tion. Hence, we decided to focus on using out under­stand­ing if human multi-modal cue inte­gra­tion to “cheat intel­li­gently” and aiming for a com­pelling embod­ied illu­sion of self-motion (i.e., “per­cep­tual realism/effectiveness”) instead of aiming for biomechanical/stimulus realism.

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