Session 5 - Applications of VR II: Towards a Phenomenology of the Body in Virtual Reality by Craig D. Murray

Recap on Merleau-Ponty

Take home message from the preface and introduction to the Phenomenology of the Body is that objective thought comes from letting go of the object of perceptual experience. An account of human experience must

Machine to Be Another Lab

The Machine to be Another Lab [1] is a international collective of researchers investigating embodiment and represented through experiments with HMD VR technology. The "Gender Swap" study examines the nature of the embodied self, where participants taken on the perspective of the other and explore the feeing of being in the other's body by practicing synchronized movements in order to obtain a sense of body ownership and identification. Watch the video [2] or see Serious games in neuroscientific experiments for further details.

Applications of VR

General question: How can we construct interdisciplinary questions concerning VR? First, let's look at some of the state of the art applications of VR.

→ Gaming - Surely the most popular use of VR is as a means to experience a more vivid and sensational video game experience. This goes for games with pure entertainment purposes, but also Serious games. A quick browse on Youtube will reveal the rapidly increasing VR video games industry.

→ Military - Dismounted soldier training, a 157 million dollar program released last summer, is essentially a hi-tech Call of Duty experience, helping soldiers to react appropriately to specific and realistic combat situations. See Serious games in military or the video here [3]. PTSD treatment: see this Motherboard documentary on VR technologies used to help treat PTSD [4] and Serious games in therapy.

→ Clinical Practice - Clinicians in the University of San Diego are using VR to practice exposure therapy with patients with phobias. → Gaming