Out of Body Experience

I run a paranormal board and also used to frequent another paranormal image board just for creeps sake... Some of those people would say that leaving your body makes it vulnerable to da demons. Now you are da demons antigravity. :lol:

:? Seriously though, I've always been interested in the idea that you can be wide awake and go fully into theta wave state where you have absolute clarity in your mental visualizations, and can do stuff like you would in a lucid dream...or plan out great machines like Nikola Tesla. It would be nice to be able to activate that... you know without drugs.

Have you ever woken up and just seen organized geometry in the pulses of the dark? Normally you close your eyes, and it's not pitch black, but there is some kind of disorganized imagery or pulsing (not talking about ghosting of whatever bright visuals you were looking at before). If you just wake up (and it's dark), and look for it, it's like looking at a kaleidoscope, but then when you're fully awake, it's just globs.

I just saw your Post - had the same thought and made this Post under "VR Game Design & Best Practices"
viewtopic.php?f=32&t=3995

There is good experiment about this, and as you said, not very hard to realize thanks to the oculus ;) But as I understood it you need also an pysical connection to the things you see - over vibration etc.

"Prelucid" wrote:
I run a paranormal board and also used to frequent another paranormal image board just for creeps sake... Some of those people would say that leaving your body makes it vulnerable to da demons. Now you are da demons antigravity. :lol:

Well, there's never been a shortage of wusses out there. ;)
I'll ride that succubus around like a pony.

"Prelucid" wrote:

:? Seriously though, I've always been interested in the idea that you can be wide awake and go fully into theta wave state where you have absolute clarity in your mental visualizations, and can do stuff like you would in a lucid dream...or plan out great machines like Nikola Tesla. It would be nice to be able to activate that... you know without drugs.

Have you ever woken up and just seen organized geometry in the pulses of the dark? Normally you close your eyes, and it's not pitch black, but there is some kind of disorganized imagery or pulsing (not talking about ghosting of whatever bright visuals you were looking at before). If you just wake up (and it's dark), and look for it, it's like looking at a kaleidoscope, but then when you're fully awake, it's just globs.

Just use autodesk products for enough years and this stuff just happens..lol- but drugs can be a short cut for certain.

"idrs" wrote:
I just saw your Post - had the same thought and made this Post under "VR Game Design & Best Practices"
viewtopic.php?f=32&t=3995

There is good experiment about this, and as you said, not very hard to realize thanks to the oculus ;) But as I understood it you need also an pysical connection to the things you see - over vibration etc.

This specific article was actually saying that it's as simple as projecting your heart beat as a real-time pulsating halo onto a 3D-Avatar, which is a ridiculously basic tweak.

Steve Jobs is famous for setting the timing of the pulsating lights on Macbooks to that of a human heartbeat to enhance the connection between man and machine, and this may give further insight into the power behind that decision.
http://blog.waxmarketing.com/2011/09/19/how-apples-marketing-strategy-targets-our-dna/ .. After seeing how strongly my 17 month old reacts to Apple products, I wouldn't be surprised if that had a secret baby research lab at apple either.. If you can get your customers at the age of 1, you've got a deep connection for life I'd assume.

So back to the pulsating heart OBE connection.. I just want to know where I feel like I'm going. If I play a game of VR Tomb Raider where Lara is pulsing to my heart rate, am I going to feel like I have breasts and a pencil thin waist?? LOL

Or is that OBE experience instead more displaced and kind of floating in the ether-

If it is indeed a targeted OBE experience, man- that could make a 3rd person game like GTA V very interesting.. with the addition of a pulsing avatar halo, a rift, and a cheap heart-rate USB monitor I could potentially feel like on a deep level I'm actually that game avatar?? Holy crap knockers..

If nobody jumps on this, I'll hafta rig up some tests in the next week or so and post observations..

I actually posted this article as well. (viewtopic.php?f=26&t=3881)
I'm very interested in experimenting with this, especially with the assumption that it should be even more effective from a first-person perspective where your avatar's body is fully visible. Here are the questions we should attempt to answer:

-Was the experiment more effective because the image shown to subject was of their own body?
-If you look down and see a different body (like a robot, solider, mage, etc), will the idea still work?
-Does it have to be a full halo, or just any visual representation of your current heart-rate? (such as a pulsating light on the HUD, or an actual EKG readout)
-What about the color of said representation? I assume the brain will respond most prominently to reds.
-What if the representation is auditory instead of visual? Would a combination of the two be most effective?

The Video in that link didn't tell me alot, only, that with that halo, as a visual feedback, you get the OBE. I am sceptical about that - but it should be not so hard to create a avatar with a halo of the heartbeat and see what happens.

The research i explained in my post has a good point why it should only work when there is pysical feedback on the player in the real world. The Brain seem to need a touch-feedback, to actually know that this is the brains body. So if your brain gets the input over the see-sense that there is a avatar and on the same time a pysical feedback over vibration - because the avatar is getting stabbed or something - its good for the brain to say "ok, thats my body" and you have a OBE.

An OBE should not depend on exacly your body (the brain doesn't even know how it looks like exacly), it could be any kind of avatar i guess - also Tomb Raider :P - but i am not sure if it could be a dinosaur or a robot.

But i don't have the hardeware, neither a pulse-band nor a vibrating or electroshoking device... :( But I would like to participate if i can do something. It would be exciting to create a OBE :)
... wait a minute - i got one vibrating device - my iPhone ! - man - but no iMac. mmh I will send myself Emails to get that thing vibarting ... got to test that lol

"idrs" wrote:

But i don't have the hardeware, neither a pulse-band nor a vibrating or electroshoking device... :( But I would like to participate if i can do something. It would be exciting to create a OBE :)
... wait a minute - i got one vibrating device - my iPhone ! - man - but no iMac. mmh I will send myself Emails to get that thing vibarting ... got to test that lol

I've got my eye on getting something like this up and running..
http://reblogcontrollers.blogspot.com/2008/08/heartbeat-midi-controller.html

Midi to unity would be perfect

That sounds intressting! And it works so easy, only over the finger! You could just use that as a MIDI-Signal input in Unity? That could do also alot more - only hearing that creepy sound in the game - would scare alot ;)

Yes! :shock: It would be amazing to synchronize background music to the player's own heart rate. Not just for increasing tension in horror or action games but to aid in more therapeutic types of experiences as well.

I've actually been looking into such things for a bit and I think that we may be able to enhance such an experience with the use of other items in conjunction with the Oculus Rift. By using something such as a NeuroSky Mindwave or Emotiv EPOC, we could get sufficient amounts of data for custom software to adjust to the heartbeats and mindsets of players on a more personal level.

My particular focus at this time is on making the transition between different products in a hub system (think Peach's Castle in Mario 64, but for entirely different games rather than levels) serve a mood changing purpose in order to attune the player to the mindset we feel is best for experiencing the settings and gameplay of the different games. Biofeedback provides us with an excellent method of gaining data on the mindset player have coming in, which we then have software modify by using subliminal mood changing using subtle aesthetic cues (color, edge smoothing, music matching) to get the user to where we need them to be. The out of body sensation with the usage of a heart beat being described could be helpful in supporting this end.

Just going to throw this in here as well, but has anyone thought of trying to synch a virtual hand to one's actual hand using the Leap Motion or Kinect? I'd imagine the Body Transfer Illusion could have profoundly more powerful effect if the simulated body part actually responded to commands.

BTW, this is my first post on this forum. Hope I haven't made a fool of myself and if I have, I apologize. :)