[-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment: week 2

[sophia lycouris]

Thanks Samantha

>There's documentation of my last CAVE project with dancer Asimina Chremos
here. 

I can't the link, maybe your email format doesn't allow links?

>Often there is a push toward photorealism with the intent to invoke or
create/manipulate particular emotions or sensations in the user.[.....] I
question the utopian (particularly when it imagines the photoreal). I wonder
about this, perhaps [.....] Leaving aside the production and technical
reasons I question Oculus, there is the question of embodiment.

If I understand your point above correctly, then I think you have faced
similar problems with me in terms of having to deal with vision (and vision
taken from a very narrow place) being positioned and assumed as the dominant
sense. I have encountered very similar issues in my own work and research,
and specifically in relation to an exploration of how haptic technology can
facilitate the generation of kinaesthetic empathy for blind people. I was
interested in the development of a haptic pad that can offer vibrations
which are supposed to generate some form of kinaesthetic empathy for blind
viewers attending dance performance - through a mapping of motion tracking
date in real-time conditions. I had to fight very hard against the
assumption that the role of the haptic pad is to be a literal mirror of the
activity happening in the performance space. So, if there is a dancer for
example doing some movement downstage right, then the haptic pad should be
generating vibrations in the equivalent corner. This is a literal,
figurative, photorealistic approach to this problem! Whereas the haptic pad
is a medium in its own right, and it should be generating vibrations which
relate to the overall sense of movement that happens on stage, not what
individual dancers are doing. This needs some special work in order to
achieved. Having a (often also) poor representation of the individual
movements on the haptic pad and transferring the responsibility of
synthesising these movements into this overall dynamic event (that sighted
viewers experience) to the blind user is actually not fair ! It won't happen
for them, they will start trying to decode these movements, which is not the
point. When we experience kinaesthetic empathy in whichever form (and there
are huge debates obviously about this, amongst neuroscientists) we do not
experience it as result of decoding individual movements we see, which we
then synthesise in our brains and this generates the sensation. Something
else happens between and across the movements we see (for those of us who
can see through their eyes), and this is the bit I am looking for. So no
realistic approaches... I suspect this might be the problem you mention
below with the current approaches about immersion... that it refers to the
idea of diving in a photorealistic environment.

>Coming from a theater background, I think of embodiment in its physical
theater terms. That is, the psychophysical where there is an impulse to
unite mind and body in the performer. Whether this impulse is right or not,
is not as important to me as if is it possible in virtual performance.
Perhaps this question is a good prompt toward discussion. There is something
about ideals of "immersion" that suggest or strive to bring about this unity
in the virtual elsewhere. Past experience and current work questions the
ability to create this cohesion of mind and body (especially in HMD) because
the performer/user is still tethered to the physical kinesthetic,Â
proprioceptive sense. 


>My current design for an Oculus project emphasizes the physical traces of
the body. 

I would love to see this !!!

Sophia 

-----Original Message-----
From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
[mailto:empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Samantha Gorman
Sent: 11 July 2014 18:33
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment: week 2

----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------