Beaming into the rat world: enabling real-time interaction between rat and human each at their own scale.

Immersive virtual reality (IVR) typically generates the illusion in participants that they are in the displayed virtual scene where they can experience and interact in events as if they were really happening. Teleoperator (TO) systems place people at a remote physical destination embodied as a robotic device, and where typically participants have the sensation of being at the destination, with the ability to interact with entities there. In this paper, we show how to combine IVR and TO to allow a new class of application.

Multisensory stimulation can induce an illusion of larger belly size in immersive virtual reality.

Background: Body change illusions have been of great interest in recent years for the understanding of how the brain represents the body. Appropriate multisensory stimulation can induce an illusion of ownership over a rubber or virtual arm, simple types of out-of-the-body experiences, and even ownership with respect to an alternate whole body. Here we use immersive virtual reality to investigate whether the illusion of a dramatic increase in belly size can be induced in males through (a) first person perspective position (b) synchronous visual-motor correlation between real and virtual arm movements, and (c) self-induced synchronous visual-tactile stimulation in the stomach area.

Comparison of people's responses to real and virtual handshakes within a virtual environment.

In this paper we present a method for evaluating a haptic device which simulates human handshakes interfaced via a metal rod. We provide an overview of the haptic demonstrator and the control algorithm used for delivering realistic handshakes. For the evaluation of this handshake demonstrator we introduce a 'ground truth' approach, where we compare the robot handshakes with handshakes operated by a human via the same metal rod.