[From Discover magazine’s Not Exactly Rocket Science blog]
The Alice Illusion – scientists convince people that they’re dolls or giants
May 26th, 2011 by Ed Yong
In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the titular heroine quaffs a potion that shrinks her down to the size of a doll, and eats a cake that makes her grow to gigantic proportions. Such magic doesn’t exist outside of Lewis Carroll’s imagination, but there are certainly ways of making people think that they have changed in size.
There’s nowhere in the world that’s better at creating such illusions than the lab of Henrik Ehrsson in Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. In a typical experiment, a volunteer is being stroked while wearing a virtual reality headset. She’s lyng down and looking at her feet, but she doesn’t see them. Instead, the headset shows her the legs of a mannequin lying next to her.
As she watches, Bjorn van der Hoort, one of Ehrsson’s former interns, uses two rods to stroke her leg, and the leg of the mannequin, at the same time. This simple trick creates an overwhelming feeling that the mannequin’s legs are her own. If the legs belong to a Barbie, she feels like she’s the size of a doll. If the legs are huge, she feels like a 13-foot giant.
Van der Hoort performed this illusion on almost 200 people. Questionnaires revealed that they did indeed think of the mannequins as their own body parts. Familiar objects didn’t break the spell. When van der Hoort threatened the mannequins’ legs with a knife, the volunteers’ skin broke into a worried sweat, as if their real bodies were in danger. If he touched the doll’s legs with a pencil or his finger, the recruits thought they were being prodded by giant objects. Rather than feeling like dolls in a normal world, they felt like normal people in a giant world.
Ehrsson’s group have spent the last several years developing several similar illusions, all using headsets and synchronous stroking. They have convinced people that they’re having out-of-body experiences, fooled people into thinking that they have swapped bodies with a person of the opposite gender or a mannequin, and convinced people that they have three arms. The illusions are amusing, but this is serious work – each one reveals something new about our sense of self, and how we know that we own our bodies. Fooling people into thinking that they’re dolls or giants was just the start. The team used the illusion to show that our size affects the way we see other objects. Read more on The Alice Illusion – scientists convince people that they’re dolls or giants…
Job: PhD Scholarship on Multimodal Interaction and Museum Learning at University of Strathclyde
PhD Scholarship on Multimodal Interaction and Museum Learning – Supporting Engagement and Learning with Novel Museum Technologies
The Mobiquitous Lab at the University of Strathclyde, UK invites applications for a 3-year PhD position funded by a University scholarship.
Research theme / project description
Museums worldwide are experimenting with novel interface technologies to increase both entertainment and educational benefits for visitors. But while many installations support hands-on activity, this often just consists of frantic button-pushing. It seems much harder to support intellectual-emotional engagement with the content and meaningful learning.
This project will investigate how different multimodal interaction techniques support mindful engagement and learning in museums and how novel interaction modalities can enhance the traditional museum experience, for example by augmenting exhibit artefacts. Different sensory modalities provide different affordances for interaction and learning. The project will focus on what kinds of engagement different modalities support, and how these might be more powerful when combined (or on their own, e.g. using only tactile output). The student will study existing installations in museums as well as conduct focused experiments. Ideally, for the latter the student will develop small-scale installations that for example use different modalities to represent information. We aim to establish collaboration with local Scottish museums within this project. Read more on Job: PhD Scholarship on Multimodal Interaction and Museum Learning at University of Strathclyde…