Learn to shake your new tail as a virtual animal

Read more: "Dreams on demand: Virtual reality finally delivers"

Virtual worlds are fun to explore, but what about virtual bodies? It turns out we can quickly learn to control an avatar in the form of an animal if our movements are mapped on to its digital representation.

William Steptoe and colleagues at University College London gave 32 volunteers an avatar with a tail and allowed some of them to control it by moving their own bodies. The volunteers then played a virtual-reality game in which they had to use the avatar's hands or tail to hit coloured lights that lit up in rings around it. Lights in the outer ring could only be hit with the tail, which could extend about half a metre beyond what the avatar's hands could reach.

None of the volunteers was told how to control the tail, but half of them were given the ability to move it by twisting their hips while the other half had a tail that moved at random. Those with a controllable tail had their hip position tracked by cameras 60 times a second, with the readings mapped on to the position of the tail.

The team found that people who could control the tail learned quickly. By the end of the 10-minute game they were as good at hitting the lights with their tail as they were with their hands.

But while they were learning, they temporarily became less competent with their hands. Steptoe thinks this is because mastering a new body part requires the brain to give less priority to existing ones.

Transcending the body

The idea of extending the body, whether in real life or virtually, is not new. For example, performance artist Stelarc has strapped a mechanical third hand onto his right arm, which he could control using muscles in his abdomen and legs via sensors that picked up electrical activity.

Steptoe's VR experiment also fits with previous studies that suggest the brain easily adapts to extra body parts. Brain activity in monkeys trained to use a tool, for example, shows that to some extent they treat the tool as part of their own arm, reacting when the tool is touched as if it had been their hand (Trends in Cognitive Science, DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2003.12.008). Steptoe thinks something very similar is happening in the virtual reality setting.

And virtual reality could allow us to go far beyond having longer arms or an extra limb. In principle, says Steptoe, we could inhabit any form. Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, for example, once briefly experienced being a virtual lobster. The only constraint is how we map control from our real body on to the virtual one.

Virtual bodies could one day let us interact with computers in new ways, says Steptoe. "In VR we can replace your body completely."

Journal reference: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2013.32

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