The artist Mark Farid is preparing to become someone else for a month. In a fascinating experiment, currently seeking support on the crowd-funding site Kickstarter, he plans to take up residence in a London gallery, don a virtual reality headset and noise-cancelling earphones, and give over his senses to a single incoming feed.
This feed will be provided by “the other”, a volunteer who will wear a pair of spectacles equipped with cameras that record everything they do from the first-person perspective and send this live to Farid’s headset. The artist will have no other contact with humans. He will live in the experience of this other person.
The point is discover how adaptable the brain is to another physical body – and whether our sense of self comes from inherent personality or cultural identity. It is, of course, a question philosophy has toyed with for hundreds of years: is the body a mere sensory vessel for the brain, or is identity inextricably linked to its physical manifestation?
Us in cyberspace
The internet has afforded us all the chance to create disembodied identities; the people we are on Twitter, on Facebook and in multiplayer fantasy games like World of Warcraft may not align at all with the people we are in “real life” – we have become skilled at adopting virtual personas.
But virtual reality is an interesting further step in the question of whether our sense of self is a malleable construct. For the past decade, cognitive neuroscientists have been studying the concept of “body transfer illusion”, the idea that the brain can be “tricked” into taking ownership of a body or body part that it is not one’s own. Through affordable VR headsets such as the Oculus Rift and Sony’s forthcoming Project Morpheus, we may all soon be given the chance to project our identities beyond cyberspace; to inhabit different bodies. It could be that this experiment, although extreme, may signpost where we’re all heading.
Already there are thousands of programmers and designers creating immersive VR experiences with the Oculus Rift development kit. At the recent Gamescom exhibition in Cologne attendees got the chance to try a VR version of the game Alien: Isolation, a thriller in which Amanda Ripley, the daughter of Ellen Ripley from the Alien movies, confronts the deadly xenomorph monster on a deserted space station. Many attendees found the experience of inhabiting the sci-fi universe frightening, but others were more interested in the sensation of being in Amanda’s body. Players could look down and see their arms, legs and torso – but it was both theirs and not theirs. When Oculus Rift and Project Morpheus launch next year, this is likely to be a common gaming experience.
Indeed, it is through games, rather than art experiments that we’re likely to truly discover how adaptable we all are to new physical identities. Games have been putting us into immersive virtual environments for decades – and as gamers we tend to spend many hours, even weeks or months in worlds like Skyrim, Grand Theft Auto and Warcraft. The adoption of virtual reality input into any of these games will very quickly provide researchers with many millions of prolonged virtual embodiment test cases.
Should we be worried? Some psychologists have expressed concerns over the Farid experiment, and its possible effects on his sense of self. Quoted in the Independent, Barbara Sahakian, a professor of clinical neuropsychology, said: “It could be extremely disturbing and it is unclear whether any potential damage to Mark’s mental health could be repaired.”
However, there have also been interesting experiments into virtual embodiment that have suggested positive outcomes and experiences. In 2010, researchers at Barcelona University, gave 24 men a virtual reality headset that allowed them to see and hear the world as a female character. They found that subjects very quickly developed a profound physiological identification with the onscreen body, even flinching when their virtual avatar was slapped by another character. This concept has also been fascinatingly explored in the art installation The Machine to be Another, which allows two participants to virtual swap bodies through VR headsets and cameras.
Researchers at Barcelona suggested that this kind of VR representation could be used to treat stroke victims how to re-use their bodies. But the exploration of body representation and displacement could have other interesting ramifications. This year, Yifei Chai, a student at the Imperial College London, created a virtual reality experiment in which one person wearing a VR headset was given control over the body movements of another person wearing a head-mounted camera and an electrical stimulation suit.
Although some participants, including a New Scientist reporter found the experience unsettling, Chai spoke of his belief that the system could be used to teach people about empathy, by literally putting us in someone else’s shoes. Last year, the virtual reality researcher Tabitha Peck ran a VR experiment in which she found that racial bias decreased when white participants embodied a dark skinned body.
Being is presence
Interestingly, the difference between all of these experiments and Farid’s project is a sense of control. Farid will be viewing rather than participating in the feed from The Other and it’s questionable whether the results will provide an analogue of the interactive VR experience. The cyberpsychologist Berni Good argues that true presence in a virtual environment can only come about through interactivity.
“There is a difference between living a life and watching someone living their life without having control over the interactions,” she says. “In VR gaming, the individual is able to control their surroundings and this ability is key to enable presence and immersion. An individual will develop their own social constructs as they move through their lives, these will influence how they think and behave. But with this project there is an assumption that a shared visual experience will equate to a shared psychological one.”
Although brave and perhaps even transformative, Farid’s experiment could turn out to be a pale imitation of the phenomenon we’re all likely to experience first-hand through virtual reality games. Immersive game spaces have always allowed us to experiment with different notions of self. Amy Bruckman, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, researched multiplayer online games throughout the 1990s, referring to them as “identity workshops” where players could explore social or gender roles. Virtual reality is likely to accentuate this sense of games as venues for exploring experimental personas.
In the near future, we may all become identity tourists, swapping between bodies in different games, experimenting with our sense of selves as each world dictates – and maybe learning to better empathise with others in the process. In his groundbreaking book Virtual Reality, Howard Rheingold spoke to VR researcher Eric Gullichsen who talked about the fundamentally malleability of human nature. “As you conduct more of your life and affairs in cyberspace your conditioned notion of a unique and immutable body will give way to a far more liberated notion of ‘body’ as something quite disposable and, generally, limiting,” he said. “You will find that some bodies work best in some situations while others work best in others.”
And we may not be restricted to human archetypes. In the early ‘90s virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier experimented with “homuncular flexibility” – the ability of the brain to adapt to very different physical bodies in VR simulations. Seeking to test its limits, he created a controllable lobster in a virtual space and found that participants quickly learned to inhabit and control the creature, even though it had extra limbs. It led him to ask, if the brain can cope with something this weird, what will future VR experiences have to offer? Games will be the first to answer this. Games will doubtless make us into dragons and aliens.
Farid, then, is really only scratching the ontological surface of where virtual reality could take us in the coming years. Interactive virtual entertainment will very quickly overtake this experiment as gamers transfer their playing habits into VR worlds. Many players may never be quite themselves ever again.
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