DailyDirt: Fooling Your Senses

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Visual illusions can be fun to observe, and there are countless examples that trick human perception into seeing things that aren't real. However, other senses can also be fooled. As computer interfaces try to engage more senses (eg. touch, spatial awareness, etc), there may be interesting applications for tricking human perception for virtual reality environments. We may also just learn more about how our brains work. Here are just a few illusions that might seem creepy or cool, depending on your point of view.

• The Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) is a trick that fools your brain into thinking that a fake rubber hand is actually your own hand -- causing the person to recoil if the rubber hand is attacked or threatened. You can re-create this illusion yourself at home -- if you have a realistic-looking rubber hand just lying around. [url]
• An interactive project creates a 15-minute simulation of what it might feel like to have Parkinson's disease. Using a combination of video and a haptic feedback glove, this augmented reality setup expands on the Rubber Hand Illusion to trick a person into feeling involuntary hand tremors. [url]
• For many years, some people have reported mysterious or supernatural feelings of a ghost-like presence, and oftentimes these experiences are accompanied by medical conditions such as epilepsy, stroke or other neurological disorder. Researchers studying this strange brain illusion have developed a robot that can induce the feeling in healthy people, and this experimental device could make it easier to study this "phantom presence" phenomenon. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: augmented reality, brain, haptics, illusions, perception, rhi, rubber hand illusion, senses, simulation, virtual reality