Oculus Rift

The Oculus rift is an extremely exciting technology, with lots of possibilities for creating not only more immersive versions of existing mediums, but also for inventing and exploring entirely new forms of experience altogether. It allows you to modify (and hack) your experience at a very primal level, and we are very excited to see what we can make with it.

Our interest was well and truly piqued When David Allistone and Louis d'Aboville visited Inition studios in London for a Virtual Reality open day (event blog post here) I was really taken aback by Nissan's "Vertigo" experience, and how visceral my reaction to it was even though I knew, and could clearly see that it wasn't real.

                                

                                            This very nearly made me throw up

The (Cognitive) Science Bit :

A huge part of your brain is dedicated to processing visual information, so visual input is an incredibly powerful force in influencing how you experience and perceive the world around you. I studied cognitive science at University for a while, and find this area fascinating. I particularly like the idea that your proprioception (your brain's internal model of what the body is feeling) can be subverted and that you can be made to feel things that aren't real.

This vertigo VR experience was incredibly powerful, and really stuck with me. It brought to mind the rubber hand illusion. This is a famous cognitive science party trick which uses visual stimuli to fool your body into feeling an arm that isn't yours as your own :

This same effect has been applied by Vilayanur Ramachandran to help patients overcome phantom limb pains (an excruciating condition that was previously extremely difficult to treat)

Cognitive scientists have also used this effect to induce out of body experiences in the past using VR goggles 

                                      

At the ICT Art connect conference David and Louis attended in February (##BLOG LINK##), one of the most interesting talks was by a chap named Carl H Smith.

He is an academic researcher looking into what he calls "Context Engineering"  Context engineering is the idea f technologies or experiences that by changing the way we are presented with information, trick us, and expose the fact that many of the things we take for granted as fixed in how we perceive the world are in fact, fluid and entirely changeable.For example, an optical illusion is definitely context engineering. It uses subtle visual cues to trick the systems in our brain that help decide what exactly it is that we are looking at 

Another very interesting example of context engineering is an experiment which involves fitting people with glasses that flip the world either upside down or back to front

The crazy thing is that after a while, your brain can completely adjust to this, and no longer experiences the upside down world as seeming strange. When you take the goggles off, you actually need to go through the whole thing and readjust to having right way up vision! (although the more you do it the less time this takes)

People have even gotten so used to it that they could put the goggles on and take them off whilst riding a bike! If your brain can adjust to that, then surely there's all sorts of interesting superpowers you could give yourself....

How about 360 degree vision? The FlyVIZ headset gives you a panoramic view stitched together in realtime, so you can see behind yourself.

According to the people that make the headset, people can usually adjust in just 15 minutes to having 360 vision!

With the oculus rift, all sorts of new possibilities exist. One project that Carl H Smith showed in his talk at ICT Art Connect was this project, that lets two people swap bodies.

Gender Swap - Experiment with The Machine to Be Another from BeAnotherLab on Vimeo.

Our Experiments

We only got the Oculus at the end of June, and have unfortunately been too busy with other things to get stuck into making anything much for it so far.

We did, however get the example project in Unity running, and get some 3D scans of cross dressing smurfs into it : 

I also got it up and running in TouchDesigner, and although this is not the easiest tool for creating lots of 3D content, it could be very useful in creating audio and motion controlled effects and experiences in the future


                                      


Exploring Senses artist Louis d'Aboville recently started working with local artists Kate Genevieve and Rachel Blackman to develop technologies for a workshop and exhibition for Brighton Digital festival. As a result of this, he will also be working with Kate and her colleague Keisuke Suzuki from Sussex University to resurrect and update an Oculus rift project made with Paul Hayes last year.

Kate has previously made a VR piece investigating sensory illusions for White Night festival :

                  

NO PLACE @ Embassy Court from C H R Θ M A on Vimeo.

The project with Paul hayes is called Gather, and is described here as follows :

"Gather, a multisensory animation, combines immersive animation and touch, to explore a viewer’s sense of where the body stops and the environment begins. Gather is made as an animated short film for Video Head Goggles. It plays with manipulating a viewer’s sense of touch and vision: participants watch animated visuals through a Head Mounted Display whilst holding out one hand which is stimulated in time to visual effects they see through the goggles. Each animated effect is augmented by tactile sensation; whether it is holding a stone in the hand or a leaf touching the fingertips."

It is a kind of meditative experience incorporation sensory illusions. This will be the perfect project to pick up the Unity skills necessary to start creating our own experiences from scratch. It is also absolutely perfect for trying out the new Oculus rift Leap Motion mounts.

A talk by Kate Genevieve at TEDx Brigton 2013

As we mentioned in our blog post about the Inition VR open day we were quite taken with the abstract Gareth Pugh demo we tried :

In the future we would love to try and develop something similar. I think this demo was clearly what I had in mind when making this version of a 3D scanned smurf model :

Also, once we have accumulated enough good quality 3D models, we think a fun, and entirely acheivable first project could be a surreal take on the idea of a rollercoaster demo, and we would like to make a kind of toy hack ghost train experience. Who knows, maybe we will even take it on a real rollercoaster one day!