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BeAnotherLab is an international anti-disciplinary collective dedicated to investigate the relationship between identity and empathy, attempting to communicate, understand and expand subjective experience through embodiment and telepresent experiences. The collective was born in Barcelona.
The "machine" is an open source system developed by BeAnotherLab which uses a head-mounted display to transmit video from one person's perspective to another. [1] The specifications for the system, including software, are freely available. [2] The most recent iteration of the project uses the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset. In the first project to use the system, one person plays the role of "user"and the other "performer". They each occupy separate but identical rooms, and as the user explores the room the performerfollows their movements in real time. Because the user receives video from the performer's perspective, the user feels as though they are inhabiting the body of the performer. As they interact with objects in the room, the performertransmits personal thoughts to the user through headphones to create a furthered sense of intimacy. A member of BeAnotherLab, Phillip Betrand, said of the experiment,
"We believe this allows for a deeper experience for a user, knowing that their point of view is that of an actual human being, and not a virtual avatar. In the last year, we’ve observed that subjects tend to demonstrate empathetic feelings towards the performers they didn't have before. They say that the experience has raised their awareness about the performers' social conditions, that they were able to go 'deep into this other person's life.'" [3]
Daanish Masood, a member of BeAnotherLab and advisor at the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, has since used the project to explore conflict resolution applications for tensions across cultural barriers. [4]
Using a modified version of The Machine To Be Another system, Gender Swap allows a user to feel as though they are inhabiting the body of someone with a different gender from their own. The piece focuses on the interaction between the sense of touch and vision. Two users of different genders wear Oculus Rift headsets which transmit the view from the each other's perspective. The users synchronize their movements and run their hands along their bodies. By associating the visuals from each other's point of view with the sensation of being touched, the users are supposed to have the sensation of inhabiting each other's bodies. In April 2014, the project won a Learning, Sciences and Humanities award from Laval Virtual, an annual event focusing on virtual reality projects. [5] It was also awarded an honorary mention at Ars Electronica. [6] Because of the project's success, BeAnotherLab started a research collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in January 2015. In this collaboration they hope to further upgrade the hardware and software which comprise the Machine To Be Another, as well as to explore new social applications for the system.
Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs pose tracking and 3D near-eye displays to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment, education and business. Other distinct types of VR-style technology include augmented reality and mixed reality, sometimes referred to as extended reality or XR, although definitions are currently changing due to the nascence of the industry.
Immersion into virtual reality (VR) is a perception of being physically present in a non-physical world. The perception is created by surrounding the user of the VR system in images, sound or other stimuli that provide an engrossing total environment.
Oculus Rift is a discontinued line of virtual reality headsets developed and manufactured by Oculus VR, a virtual reality company founded by Palmer Luckey that is widely credited with reviving the virtual reality industry. It was the first virtual reality headset to provide a realistic experience at an accessible price, utilizing novel technology to increase quality and reduce cost by orders of magnitude compared to earlier systems. The first headset in the line was the Oculus Rift DK1, released on March 28, 2013. The last was the Oculus Rift S, discontinued in April of 2021.
Palmer Freeman Luckey is an American entrepreneur best known as the founder of Oculus VR and designer of the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality head-mounted display that is widely credited with reviving the virtual reality industry. In 2017, Luckey departed Oculus and founded defense contractor Anduril Industries, a defense technology company focused on autonomous drones and sensors for military applications. Luckey ranked number 22 on Forbes' 2016 List of America's Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40.
Reality Labs is a business and research unit of Meta Platforms that produces virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) hardware and software, including virtual reality headsets such as Quest, and online platforms such as Horizon Worlds. In June 2022, several artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives that were previously a part of Meta AI were transitioned to Reality Labs. This also includes Meta's fundamental AI Research laboratory FAIR which is now part of the Reality Labs - Research (RLR) division.
The Samsung Gear VR is a virtual reality headset developed by Samsung Electronics, in collaboration with Oculus VR, and manufactured by Samsung. The headset was released on August 21, 2015.
VIVE, sometimes referred to as HTC Vive, is a virtual reality brand of HTC Corporation. It consists of hardware like its titular virtual reality headsets and accessories, virtual reality software and services, and initiatives that promote applications of virtual reality in sectors like business, arts, and video gaming.
Oculus Touch is the motion controller system used by Reality Labs in their Rift CV, Rift S, Quest, Quest 2 and Quest Pro virtual reality systems. Four iterations of the controllers have been developed; the first for use in the original Oculus Rift, which uses external tracking, the second one for use with the Rift S and the Oculus Quest, which use inside-out tracking, the third for use with the Meta Quest 2, and the fourth, entitled "Touch Pro" are included with the Quest Pro and are backwards compatible with the Quest 2. They contain 3 cameras around the controller, "TruTouch haptics" and a Snapdragon 662 processor. They track by themselves and notably, do not feature a tracking ring.
A virtual reality headset is a head-mounted device that provides virtual reality for the wearer. VR headsets are widely used with VR video games but they are also used in other applications, including simulators and trainers. VR headsets typically include a stereoscopic display, stereo sound, and sensors like accelerometers and gyroscopes for tracking the pose of the user's head to match the orientation of the virtual camera with the user's eye positions in the real world.
Virtual Desktop is a computer application that displays the user's computer monitor in a three-dimensional virtual space, for use with a virtual reality headset. At the time of its release, CNET and Polygon wrote that the software was essential for virtual reality headset owners.
Asynchronous reprojection is a class of computer graphics technologies aimed ensuring a virtual reality headset's responsiveness to user motion even when the GPU isn't able to keep up with the headset's target frame rate. Reprojection involves the headset's driver taking one or multiple previously rendered frames and using newer motion information from the headset's sensors to extrapolate the previous frame into a prediction of what a normally rendered frame would look like. "Asynchronous" refers to this process being continuously performed in parallel with rendering, allowing reprojected frames to be displayed without delay in case a regular frame isn't rendered in time.
A virtual reality game or VR games is a video game played on virtual reality (VR) hardware. Most VR games are based on player immersion, typically through head-mounted display unit or headset with stereoscopic displays and one or more controllers.
VRChat is an online virtual world platform created by Graham Gaylor and Jesse Joudrey and operated by VRChat, Inc. The platform allows users to interact with others with user-created 3D avatars and worlds. VRChat is designed primarily for use with virtual reality headsets, such as the Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest series, SteamVR headsets, and Windows Mixed Reality, but is also usable without VR in a "desktop" mode designed for either a mouse and keyboard or gamepad.
The Oculus Go is a standalone virtual reality headset developed by Meta Reality Labs in partnership with Qualcomm and Xiaomi. It is in the first generation of Facebook Technologies' virtual reality headsets, and the company's first device in the category of standalone VR headsets, which was a new category at the time of the Go's release. The Oculus Go was unveiled on October 11, 2017 during the Oculus Connect developer conference, and released on May 1, 2018. Xiaomi launched their own version of the headset in China as the Mi VR Standalone on May 31, 2018.
The first-generation Oculus Quest is a discontinued virtual reality headset developed by Oculus, a brand of Meta Platforms, and released on May 21, 2019. Similar to its predecessor, Oculus Go, it is a standalone device, that can run games and software wirelessly under an Android-based operating system. It supports positional tracking with six degrees of freedom, using internal sensors and an array of cameras in the front of the headset rather than external sensors. The cameras are also used as part of the safety feature "Passthrough", which shows a view from the cameras when the user exits their designated boundary area. A later software update added "Oculus Link", a feature that allows the Quest to be connected to a computer via USB, enabling use with Oculus Rift-compatible software and games.
The Oculus Rift S is a virtual reality headset co-developed by Lenovo Technologies and Facebook Technologies—a division of Meta Platforms.
Oculus Rift CV1, also known simply as Oculus Rift, is a virtual reality headset developed by Oculus VR, a subsidiary of Meta Platforms, known at the time as Facebook Inc. It was announced in January 2016, and released in March the same year. The device constituted the first commercial release in the Oculus Rift lineup.
NeosVR is a free-to-play, massively multiplayer online, virtual reality application created by Solirax. It was released for free on Microsoft Windows via Steam on May 4, 2018, with support for several VR headsets.
The Quest 2 is a virtual reality (VR) headset developed by Reality Labs, a division of Meta Platforms. It was unveiled on September 16, 2020, and released on October 13 as the Oculus Quest 2. It was then rebranded as the Meta Quest 2 in 2022, as part of a company-wide phase-out of the Oculus brand after the rebranding of Facebook, Inc. as Meta.