Some update about this!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNAa_QI_jbA

Seems like the Oculus will be available some time this year!

Can't wait! =)

Cheers

Hi dude,
This is a great idea! However I'm not convinced it needs the tech because other similar work has been done with mirrors, fake limbs & other methods.
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/ … 2470.short

"Sensory illusion study provides new insight for body representation brain disorders." September 22nd, 2013. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-09-s … ation.html

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/ … tml?cpetoc

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2 … -limb.html

It would of course depend on what specifically you want to experiment on. If you know exactly what you want to do, it should be possible to work out whether you need tech, but 'something similar to what I want to do' isn't accurate enough to guess  :  )

Some interesting related experimental themes:
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-02-p … tated.html

http://www.sciam. com/article. cfm?id=phantom- limb-cure- retrain-brain&sc=WR_20080909

Best,
AR

Hi dude,

Okay, I think I get what you mean, but not sure. I recall some dude doing this with robots and cameras/wearable monitor, but cannot find the source! If anyone else remembers this -please forward URL.

There is of course person to person BCI:
http://www.physorg.com/news174044805.html
and thought-controlled prostheses:
http://www.physorg.com/news178976346.html
Another possibility: take a look at this work with animals:
http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles … -for-Rats/

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sci … borg-rats/
http://www.nature.com/news/intercontine … ts-1.12522
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-02-b … motor.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2 … nt=dn23221

http://www.nature.com/news/monkey-brain … re-1.14765

http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles … d-Control/

...Is this more like what you have in mind?
There is also 'out of body' work, which may be more relevant...?
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-02-rea … brain.html
"Visualized heartbeat can trigger 'out-of-body experience'." August 14th, 2013. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-08-v … -body.html
Also might be interesting:
http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content … 0.abstract

Sorry I can't be of any more help!
Best,
AR

Hi dude,
Sorry I don't personally have this tech, but I recall recently someone else exploring the area and there are some links to DIY and other stuff?

Thought you would like some steaming hot research: just in today:

March 10th, 2014 in Neuroscience
'Out-of-body hippocampal amnesia', Loretxu Bergouignan, Lars Nyberg & Henrik Ehrsson, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), online 10-14 March 2014. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1318801111

"Outside the body our memories fail us." March 10th, 2014. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-03-b … ories.html

New research from Karolinska Institutet and Umeå University demonstrates for the first time that there is a close relationship between body perception and the ability to remember. For us to be able to store new memories from our lives, we need to feel that we are in our own body. According to researchers, the results could be of major importance in understanding the memory problems that psychiatric patients often exhibit.

The memories of what happened on the first day of school are an example of an episodic memory. How these memories are created and how the role that the perception of one's own body has when storing memories has long been inconclusive. Swedish researchers can now demonstrate that volunteers who experience an exciting event whilst perceiving an illusion of being outside their own body exhibit a form of memory loss.

"It is already evident that people who have suffered psychiatric conditions in which they felt that they were not in their own body have fragmentary memories of what actually occurred", says Loretxu Bergouignan, principal author of the current study. "We wanted to see how this manifests itself in healthy subjects."

The study, which is published in the scientific journal PNAS, involved a total of 84 students reading about and undergoing four oral questioning sessions. To make these sessions extra memorable, an actor (Peter Bergared) took up the role of examiner – a (fictional) very eccentric professor at Karolinska Institutet. Two of the interrogations were perceived from a first person perspective from their own bodies in the usual way, while the participants in the other two sessions experienced a created illusion of being outside their own body. In both cases, the participants wore virtual reality goggles and earphones. One week later, they either underwent memory testing where they had to recall the events and provide details about what had happened, in which order, and what they felt, or they had to try to remember the events while they underwent brain imaging with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

It then turned out that the participants remembered the 'out-of-body' interrogations significantly worse than those experienced from the normal "In body" perspective. This was the case despite the fact that they responded equally well to the questions from each situation and also indicated that they experienced the same level of emotion. The fMRI scans further revealed a crucial difference in activity in the portion of the temporal lobe – the hippocampus – that is known to be central for episodic memories.

"When they tried to remember what happened during the interrogations experienced out-of-body, activity in the hippocampus was eliminated, unlike when they remembered the other situations", says professor Henrik Ehrsson, the research group leader behind the study. "However, we could see activity in the frontal lobe cortex, so they were really making an effort to remember."

The researchers' interpretation of the results is that there is a close relationship between body experience and memory. Our brain constantly creates the experience of one's own body in space by combining information from multiple senses: sight, hearing, touch, and more. When a memory is created, it is the task of the hippocampus to link all the information found in the cerebral cortex into a unified memory for further long-term storage. During the experience of being outside one's body, this memory storage process is disturbed, whereupon the brain creates fragmentary memories instead.

"We believe that this new knowledge may be important for future research on memory disorders in a number of psychiatric conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, borderline personality disorder and certain psychoses where patients have dissociative experiences," says Loretxu Bergouignan.


Wow! Embodiment is truly crucial! ...Or is it...? -Can this one be hacked?  :  )
AR

Hi dude,
Just found:  http://www.technologyreview.com/view/52 … eal-world/

...so, how long do you think the gap will be between (a) getting really cool vr and (b) some twit filling it with adverts?  :  )
Best,
AR

Hi dude,

After Facebook "bought" Oculus there was a lot of "buzz" of people questioning the company for "selling out", and at first i didn't like the idea at all (i was thinking of apps full of crap ads etc) but later i think in the long-term could be great because, all that money was/could be invested in better hardware, research, programmers, engineering to deliver the best headset available with current tech.

And doing that (deliver a good plataform that people give a good inmersion of "being there") will make VR comeback now for real, and after that a lot of other companies (and a lot of DIY crowds) will get in too with their own alternatives (in a case that oculus goes in a "wrong direction" because of facebook being in the middle) ... so "everyone wins" i think in the long-term, as long they are alternatives.

But afaik the best shot is at oculus headset, the alternatives we have right now (sony headset, antvr etc) doesn't have what is considered "vr standard", for example at least 75-90 FPS (frame per second) (less than that gave you what is called "motion sickness") what i liked of antvr tech wise is that is wireless ... but i think that current tech can't transfer data fast enough in that medium to again, achieve a good quality VR experience (you need to sacrifice FPS, refresh rate, resolution etc).

In 10 years if this stuff keeps evolving more and more and gets pretty close to "real world interaction" which world people will spent most of the time ...? and what our brain will think about it? LOL  =)

Like we talked here a few times .. probably people who use it as tools for ehancement and not replacement will be fine ..

If not ... could be another "TE tool" to make us dependent and vulnerable?

Cheers