Limbs Lab

An interactive installation about perception of our body parts

This work is about visual perception of our body and what we would feel if we virtually substitute some parts of it. We know our hands better than any other part of our body. We are used to them and always see them in front of our eyes. The Limbs Lab offers you to see what you would feel if you had other limbs.

Inspiration

This project is part of my Games & Interactive media course. In the first part of the course we were given several awards winning Sci-Fi stories and every student had to come up with at least 10 ideas for games or interactions based on these stories.

In my case the idea of the project came from "Utopia, LOL?" By Jamie Wahls. Author describes far future, where computer can create some artificial world and place you there. Like in the Matrix. What is more, you can be a cartoon character, an animal, or even inanimate object.

Big part in the story dedicated to description of the related feelings when you are a floor tile. How do you mentally experience tension, hardness, stillness, squareness. Or if you are a bird, how does your brain work and handle that you've got wings instead of arms.

Concept

Since our multi-sensory perception can be fooled and overridden by visual information, I wanted to utilize this feature of human's perception in the project.

The installation explores where is the gap between real and virtual world. I let people put their hands inside a black box and virtually substitute the hands with something different. Additionally, they can interact with physical objects inside the box. These objects provide haptic feedback and strengthens illusion.

Building blocks

Body transfer illusion

On this image experimenter creates sensations on participant's right hand and duplicates same movement on the rubber glove. Participant only sees rubber glove, but because he feels same sensations he thinks of it as of its own hand. And we can see his reaction when the glove is being hit by experimenter. This is called body transfer illusion.

Scale, skin color, gender

Another possible direction to play with in the project is just change how hand look like. On the picture, I call it God mode, the scale of the hand is extremely big compared to objects it interacts with. Changing skin color and gender of the virtual hands should have interesting effect as well.

Immersion

Third image shows how parallax effect is being used to create illusion of 3d space. The technology is called head-coupled 3D, and supposed to improve immersion by tracking head movements. That's why the installation has camera on top.

Tracking

The project uses Leap Motion for Hands tracking. To avoid any reflections the inner part of the box was covered with black fabric. Leap motion was placed in the further top corner to be unreachable for hands and still have good enough angle for tracking.

Elements of the installation

Leap motion stream

Rigging

For some hands models I used models under free licenses. But almost all of them were either without any rig or the rig was not adapted to leap motion requirements. Thus, rigging took pretty big fraction of time.

Rigged model

Result

Making of

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