Study and development of immersive multi-sensory systems for avatar embodiment in virtual reality

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Immersive virtual reality (VR) offers the possibility of simulating not only a user's surroundings but also his visual self-representation. In other words, the user sees himself as an avatar rather than seeing his actual body. When the avatar mimics the user's movements with a very short delay, the result is a subjective feeling of ownership of the avatar where the user feels the avatar is his actual physical body. When the virtual body is not aligned with the physical body, users experience a proprioceptive drift where the perceived position of his limbs drifts towards that of the virtual avatar. In recent years, our team has harnessed this illusion through the development of a VR system that has been shown to alter a user's movements through the real-time manipulation of the movements of his avatar. We have found that the user's brain signals can be used to measure the illusion of ownership and that the illusion can be created using vibrators that give the illusion of movement, rather than actual movements. Our recent progress lead us to build upon this and take our research program to a new level in order to explore and apply the potential of real-time embodied avatars, progressing towards our ambitious long-term goal of developing a complete virtual surrogate body that is controlled and felt by its user. This research program consists of three threads. The 1st aims to integrate and extend our current technologies into a multisensory virtual body controlled by movement or imagined movements and felt through proprioceptive illusions. The 2nd aims to develop a system that allows for gradual real-time deformation of the avatar's upper and lower limbs (unilateral length, girth, segment proportions, etc.) during the embodiment experience in order to modify the user's body self-representation and alter motor control. The 3rd aims to combine a haptic exerciser with our self-avatar. Here the avatar will be driven by the movements and forces produced by users, in order to restore congruency between vision and motor control in post-stroke patients. This research will lead to fully-embodied avatars that will be used in physical rehabilitation (to study and treat pathologies that cause motor impairment, such as stroke and spinal cord injury), sports (improving sport biomechanics and learning new tasks), telepresence systems (allowing a remote user to feel fully present), robotics (feeling the movements of the robot that is controlled) and full-body surrogacy (allowing paralyzed patients to control a virtual or robotic body). The research program will train 4 graduate students and 4 undergraduates, equipping them with skills that are at the cutting edge of technology and in high demand in Canadian industry. They will learn how to: develop complex multisensory VR systems; develop highly interactive video games and real-time computer animations; acquire, process and interpret biomedical signals; develop novel human-computer interaction (HCI) methods.