Virtual Reality is normally used to give you the illusion of being in another place. You put on the Head-Mounted Display (HMD) and you are apparently somewhere else - the place depicted by the virtual reality application. However, another profound aspect of VR is that you can change not simply where you are but also who you are. This relies on the process of ’embodiment’. Normally in VR when you look down towards yourself you will see nothing – are invisible – except perhaps for some disembodied hands based on tracking the movements of your real hands. However, embodiment involves the visual substitution of your real body by a virtual one, that can be programmed to move in correspondence and synchrony with your actual movements. Moreover, when you look in a virtual mirror this can reflect your virtual body and your real movements, so that you see not your real, but your virtual self in the mirror. It has been shown many times in the research literature that the type of body you have can influence your physiology, behaviour, attitudes, and cognition.
As well as embodiment in a virtual body it is possible to become embodied in a robot body. Wearing a HMD the participant sees through cameras mounted in the eye position of a remote robot. As the participant moves so the movements are transmitted to the remote robot so that the robot moves the same. Therefore, from the point of view of the participant it is as if their consciousness has been transferred to the robot body, which might be thousands of kilometres distant.
This Research Topic is focussed on this concept of embodiment, and the corresponding implications of perceptual body ownership, agency and illusory agency. Papers in any aspect of embodiment through technological means such as VR or robotics would be welcome. The following are examples but submissions need not be limited to these:
• Technological advances in embodiment, whether through virtual or augmented reality, or teleoperations through robots
• The implications of transformed body ownership for physiology, behaviour, attitudes, cognition.
• Advances in understanding of how the brain represents the body and its actions through embodiment.
• Applications in the field of health, physical or psychological rehabilitation.
• Applications in entertainment, the media, and news.
• The implications of embodiment for ethics and law.
Any type of Frontiers paper can be submitted. See
https://www.frontiersin.org/about/author-guidelines (Summary Table).
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Topic editor Christoph Guger is CEO of g.tec. Mel Slater is CSO and founder of Virtual Bodyworks S.L. All other topic editors declare no competing interests with regards to the Research Topic subject.
Cover image is reproduced from the article "
Multi-Destination Beaming: Apparently Being in Three Places at Once through Robotic and Virtual Embodiment", published in
Frontiers in Robotics and AI in 2016.
