2021/07/13
Keio University
A research team from the Faculty of Science and Technology at Keio University, including Professor Maki Sugimoto and Reiji Miura (a master's student at the Graduate School of Science and Technology), has conducted a study in collaboration with Shunichi Kasahara (Researcher, Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. / Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo), Professor Michiaki Kitazaki (Graduate School of Engineering, Toyohashi University of Technology), Professor Masahiko Inami, and Project Researcher Adrien Verhulst (both from the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo). As part of research to verify what kind of behavior and body cognition emerge when humans acquire bodies that transcend their innate physical forms, the team investigated behavior and body cognition under a "body-duplication" condition where the body, movements, and vision were synchronized with multiple (two and four) avatars in a virtual environment. The results showed that under the condition of being synchronized with multiple (four) bodies, a certain degree of a sense of agency and a sense of body ownership could be simultaneously obtained for the multiple duplicated bodies.
This research was presented at the international conference Augmented Humans 2021 (AHs2021), held from February 22 to 24, where it received the Best Paper Award. The paper is now available on the ACM Digital Library.
Please see below for the full press release.