Out-of-body experience: Master of illusion
Ed Yong:
Ownership illusions could help people to take control of entire alien bodies, both virtual and robotic, in a way that would afford a finer degree of control than the joysticks and other controllers used to steer robots and avatars today. People who control robots, for example, would see from their machine’s perspective using goggles, steer using motion-capture suits and receive tactile feedback from gloves connected to sensors in the robot’s hands. As long as signals are transferred between human and machine within 100 milliseconds, Ehrsson predicts that “the full-body illusion will kick in”. And size should not matter. A surgeon could control a microscopic robot in a patient’s body. Giant robots could repair broken oil rigs or fractured nuclear power stations. Ehrsson smiles as he considers the possibilities.
