The experiments showed that the participants felt more connected to another person’s body when the conditions were synchronized. In all the cases, the subjects had to tell the scientists how masculine or feminine they perceived themselves. Other control conditions had the touches being asynchronous, disrupting the illusion. One of the changed conditions had the stranger’s body appear to be threatened with a knife. The synchronized nature of the touching created the illusion of another person’s body being their own. The participants had to watch the stranger’s body being touched while the same kind of action, on the same part, was being performed to their body. One of the experiments had participants wearing a head-mounted display that was playing a first-person POV video of either a male or female body. The experiments, led by Pawel Tacikowski of Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, involved a relatively large sample of 140 people. In their paper, the scientists defined gender identity as “a collection of thoughts and feelings about one’s own gender, which may or may not correspond to the sex assigned at birth.” To probe this, they designed three experiments using virtual reality that allowed people to experience what it’s like to have a body they weren’t born with. It's basically highly conceptual performance art, though we could see the technology being used in educational settings to help broaden discussions on gender, race, disabilities, and aging.Is associating with a certain gender more of a flexible sense than hardwired biological fact? A new study shows that people who were put under the illusion of having an opposite-sex body developed a more equal understanding, with fewer stereotypes, of both male and female aspects. In a larger sense, though, the Machine To Be Another "aims to promote self understanding, empathy and tolerance among users" across the spectrum. "Throughout this experiment, we aim to investigate issues like gender identity, queer theory, feminist technoscience, intimacy, and mutual respect," the Barcelona-based group says. Shock and awe: Faces of people trying Oculus RiftĪs The Bold Italic suggests, Machine To Be Another could approach territory explored by the Sex With Google Glass project, which is positioning itself as a sex-enhancement app that lets partners trade point of views.īut BeAnotherLab sees Gender Swap's potential lessons as far broader than just physical intimacy.Wearable book lets readers feel the fiction.Sex with Glass app lets you see from your partner's POV.Facebook expands gender options for user profiles.We use these techniques from neuroscience to actually affect the psychophysical sensation of being in your body." "In turn, the information from each of these senses influences how the other senses are processed. "The brain integrates different senses to create your experience of the world," BeAnotherLab member Philippe Bertrand told Fast Company. The synchronized movements are key to giving participants a sense of inhabiting another's body without being distracted by incongruous gestures. They start out moving their hands around and touching their arms and bellies, but as this Vimeo video demonstrating the interactive experiment shows, they then shed clothes, graze their own bare skin, and look into their underwear to give their partner a sense of what it's like to look down and see (hello!) equipment that's not usually there. In Gender Swap, two people stand back to back, synchronize their movements, and see in 3D - wearing a display known to produce amazingly realistic effects - what the person standing behind them is viewing. For a still greater sense of trading places, those musings can include experiences or memories associated with objects the other person picks up in his or her room - say a photo, toy, pack of cigarettes, or mirror. The storyteller, or "performer," as BeAnotherLab calls this participant, also wears a microphone for transmitting personal thoughts to the other's headphones to further enhance the realism of the embodiment experience. Gender Swap uses BeAnotherLab's low-budget, open-source Machine To Be Another, a system that allows one person to share a story by transmitting first-person video in real time to the goggles of a second person in another, identical room. Gender Swap, an experiment from Spanish art and technology collective BeAnotherLab, combines Oculus Rift head-mounted displays and first-person cameras to, well, let participants virtually swap genders. Who among us hasn't wondered at one point or another what it would be like to be another person, and maybe one of another gender? Participants in Gender Swap synchronize their movements, so when the woman touches her chest, she looks down and sees the man's hands on his chest, and vice versa.