Through decades of research, Virtual Bodyworks leverages virtual reality’s unique medium to offer new possibilities that are impossible to recreate in real life. One of these unique opportunities is Embodiment, an immersive experience that allows users to enter full body avatars through virtual reality. In Embodiment scenarios, our brain can rewire and change our self-perception, causing us to feel that our body is the same as the avatar we observe through virtual reality.
Understanding that the technology must be highly sophisticated to create natural, synchronized, and plausible scenarios, Embodiment has been shown to be uniquely effective in creating fast, efficient, and long-lasting results in implicit learning and in the reduction of biases.
One application of Embodiment that we use to foster learning in the Socrates experiment is built based on Solomon’s paradox. King Solomon, the third leader of the Jewish Kingdom, is considered the paragon of wisdom and sage judgment. For this reason, it is said that during his long reign, people travelled great distances to seek his counsel. However, it is also true—and much less well known—that his personal life was filled with bad decisions and uncontrolled passions. The paradox is one that many of us are familiar with, it is easier to give advice to others than resolve a personal problem.
But, with Embodiment, we can be both ourselves experiencing therapy as well as ourselves as counsellors. Like this we can converse with ourselves as if providing advice to a friend. Our trials recorded that 86% of the participants changed their way of thinking or feeling after Embodied self-conversation compared to 48% of those receiving a scripted conversation in VR.[1]
In various other studies it was also shown how the body someone inhabits has certain effects on the person. For example, if you embody Albert Einstein, you score better in cognitive tests. Which is really interesting as the mind seems to be able to adopt features it attributes to the avatar it embodies. Another study showed that participants had better drumming skills when they embodied a casually dressed dark skinned drummer rather than a white man dressed in a suit.
The Socrates project leverages Embodiment and these findings to engage obese individuals in a self-conversation to target three aspects that are inherent with severe obesity: recognition, self-stigmatisation, and self-determination.
Furthermore, we do not only want to use our self-conversation tool so people can gain better insights but we also want to use those effects that Embodiment has on the mindset of people. So during their self-conversation the participants will embody a healthy version of themselves so that they can easier get into a conversation for a healthier lifestyle.
Additionally, SOCRATES aims not only to treat obesity but also to serve as further proof of concept for how Embodiment can be used in clinical settings to treat behavioural conditions.
About the author
Mel Slater (He/His) DSc, is Distinguished Investigator at the University of Barcelona in the Faculty of Psychology. He became Professor of Virtual Environments at University College London in 1997 in the Department of Computer Science. He has been involved in research in virtual reality since the early 1990s and has been first supervisor of 38 PhDs in graphics and virtual reality since 1989. In 2005 he was awarded the Virtual Reality Career Award by IEEE Virtual Reality ‘In Recognition of Seminal Achievements in Engineering Virtual Reality.’ He has been involved in and led several international projects in this field. He is Field Editor of Frontiers in Robotics and AI, and Chief Editor of the Virtual Environments section. He has contributed to the scientific study of virtual reality and to technical development of this field. He has also contributed to the use of virtual reality in other fields, notably psychology and the cognitive neuroscience of how the brain represents the body. He has aimed to bring the use of virtual reality as a tool in scientific research in these areas to the highest level – for example, with publications in PNAS, Neuron, Trends in Cognitive Science, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, and ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH). He has disseminated work through the international media, with articles and features in the BBC, The New Yorker, El Pais, Scientific American, and the Wall Street Journal. He is a Founder and CSO of Virtual Bodyworks.
His current publications can be seen on: http://publicationslist.org/melslater.
[1] Slater, M., Neyret, S., Johnston, T. et al. An experimental study of a virtual reality counselling paradigm using embodied self-dialogue Sci Rep 9, 10903 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-46877-3