Creating and sharing knowledge for telecommunications

Project: VERE: Virtual Embodiment and Re-Embodiment

Acronym: VERE
Main Objective:
This project aims at dissolving the boundary between the human body and surrogate representations in immersive virtual reality and physical reality. Dissolving the boundary means that people have the illusion that their surrogate representation is their own body, and act and have thoughts that correspond to this. The work in VERE may be thought of as applied presence research and applied cognitive neuroscience, and it would also significantly add to scientific knowledge in these areas .
Imagine that you could transfer your self to an artificial body – a virtual body as represented in virtual reality or a physical robotic body. Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience show that internalising a body beyond ourselves (external, remote, alien) is possible, that our body representation is highly malleable and may be altered by appropriate changes to the normal stimulus contingencies that we are used to in every day life.

The purpose of this research is to make such body transference possible with two different modes (virtual and physical). On top of this technical achievement, that would be underpinned through ongoing neuroscience research on body representation, would be a number of practical applications that will be constructed and investigated during the project.
Reference: 257695
Funding: EC/FP7
Start Date: 01-06-2010
End Date: 01-06-2015
Team: Veronica Costa Teixeira Pinto Orvalho
Groups: Computer Graphics and Interactive Multimedia - Po
Partners: A. Kheddar - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), C. Guger - Guger Technologies (g.tec), F. Tecchia - Scuola di Studi Universitari e di Perfezionamento Sant´Anna (SSSA), M. Buss - Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), Mavi Sanchez Vive - Consorci Institut d’Investigacions Biomediques August Pi I Sunyer (IDIBAPS), Mel Slater - Universitat de Barcelona, O. Blanke - École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), S. M. Anglioti - Fondazione Santa Lucia (FSL), T. Flash - Weizmann Institute (WIS), T. Metzinger - Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (JGUM)
Local Coordinator: Veronica Costa Teixeira Pinto Orvalho
Links: http://www.vereproject.eu/

Associated Publications