Participants recruited for the studies in Chapters 4 and 6 were mainly (although not exclusively) students from the Psychology campus of the University of Barcelona. Prior to starting, participants were provided with verbal and written information regarding the experiment and were informed that they were free to withdraw whenever they de- sired, and without giving any explanation. The information sheets, consent forms, demo- graphic questionnaires and the post-experiment questionnaires for the experiments can be seen in AppendixAandC, respectively. The questionnaire given to the locals that at- tended the Tele-Immersive Journalism interviews has been provided in AppendixB. All the experiments were conducted in either Catalan, Castilian Spanish or English, depend- ing on the participant’s language of preference, and the documentation was also always available in all three languages. All participant data was kept anonymous, and no per- sonal data was published. Quotes provided by the participants in their post-experiment interviews have also been kept anonymous. Both the experimental studies carried out were approved by the Comissió Bioètica of Universitat de Barcelona.
“Blinking, Jake slowly sits up on the gurney. He looks down at his avatar body, touching his chest with one hand. He stares at his legs, eases them off the gurney and… His blue feet touch the concrete floor, taking his weight. Jake stands, feeling the strength in his legs.
His expression is child-like with wonder.” James Cameron
Avatar, 2009
4
Robot Control using BCI
and Eye Tracking
This Chapter presents the study related to the first hypothesis: It is possible to induce the
full-body ownership illusion over a remote robotic body with a highly robotic appearance. Moreover, it is possible to induce feelings of agency over the robotic body, even with non- manual control. As we discussed in detail in Chapter2, it has been shown that the full- body ownership illusion over a mannequin body is possible (Petkova & Ehrsson, 2008;
Petkova et al., 2011). Moreover, the illusion has also been successfully elicited using a
Geminoid HI-1 robot (Nishio et al., 2012;Ogawa et al., 2012), although the robot used in these experiments was specifically built to resemble a human. Our primary objective was to investigate whether it is possible to induce the BOI over a robotic body with a highly ‘robotic’ appearance. Instead of providing participants with direct control over the limbs of the robot, we chose to compare two indirect methods of control, an SSVEP- based BCI and an eye tracker. The motivation for this decision was based on the fact that we wanted to develop the concept of a real-world application, where this setup
could be used to provide a physical surrogate for people with reduced mobility. The methods and results of this study were presented at the 1st VERE PhD Symposium in 2011 and later published in the journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments
(Kishore et al., 2014). A video of the experimental setup and procedure can be seen at:
https://youtu.be/iGurLgspQxA.
4.1
Introduction
As discussed in Section 2.2.1, the illusion of ownership over a static mannequin body that substituted the real body was first shown by (Petkova & Ehrsson, 2008). Following from this work, we have also seen that the same type of body ownership illusion can be achieved with a virtual body in immersive virtual reality (Slater et al., 2010). Evidence suggests that 1PP over the virtual body can be a sufficient condition for the illusion
(Maselli & Slater, 2013), but that synchronous movement between the real and virtual
body can also contribute strongly to the illusion (Banakou et al., 2013;González-Franco
et al., 2010;Peck et al., 2013). Moreover, we also discussed that in a direct comparison
between synchronous visuotactile stimulation and synchronous visuomotor stimulation, that the latter wins out (Kokkinara & Slater, 2014).
In the experiment presented, the participants had a 1PP from the point of view of the robot; thereby, substituting the robot body for their real body in the sense that when looking toward the mirror, participants saw the robot body instead of their own. It was uncertain whether the FBOI would be induced in a robot with a humanoid, but also highly robotic appearance, as some results suggest that the body has to be humanlike in form and appearance (Section2.4.1). Furthermore, motivated by the enabling situation, i.e. where the person for which the system is intended cannot manually control such a humanoid robot by moving his or her limbs (e.g., quadriplegics) we limited the control of the robot to abstract methods. This forms a highly critical difference between the presented experiment and the study by (Nishio et al., 2012;Ogawa et al., 2012), where
4.1 Introduction
direct correlation between hand movements was provided, although in a more recent study BCI-based control was also developed with the Geminoid HI-1 robot (Alimardani et al., 2013;Alimardani et al., 2015).
The relationship between body ownership (this is my body that is moving) and agency (I am responsible for moving my body) has been the subject of many studies (Kalckert & Ehrsson, 2012;Sato & Yasuda, 2005;Tsakiris et al., 2007). The general view is that although there is a dissociation between ownership and agency in the sense that one can be diminished without affecting the other, it is also the case that the very factor that induces agency (direct control of a limb or body) has been shown to induce an ownership illusion over a virtual hand that moved in synchrony with the real hand (Sanchez-Vives
et al., 2010) and even when the hand was moved by a BCI (Perez-Marcos et al., 2012).
Therefore, one of the primary focuses of this paper was to examine the extent of body ownership induced by embodiment in a robot body, where there might or might not be a sensation of agency achieved through an abstract control method.
Two existing technologies to control the robot by nonphysical means were tested: a Brain-Computer Interface and eye tracking. Both are established paradigms and appro- priate for usage in immersive settings such as the one in our experiment (Friedman et al., 2010). We elected to use the real-time BCI paradigm, Steady-State Visually Evoked Po- tential (Wang et al., 2006). An SSVEP-based BCI was chosen because it has been shown to be usable by most people (Guger et al., 2012), can differentiate multiple commands, including an idle state, and does not require extensive training to achieve proficiency
(González-Franco et al., 2011;Guger et al., 2003). SSVEP functions by users visually ob-
serving stimuli that are continuously blinking at different frequencies; these frequencies are replicated in the visual cortex and can be detected with scalp EEG (Electroencephalo- gram).
An alternative technology that also uses the human visual system, eye tracking, holds great potential in this domain, but has been explored mostly in desktop settings or in real-world settings that do not include the complication of HMD hardware (Majaranta
et al., 2011). Eye tracking works by focusing the eye on a particular screen position; items can include an extra triggering mechanism. The de facto standard triggering mechanism requires the user to focus on a point for an extended period, in order to signify the ‘click’. Although it is a common view that eye tracking is a viable method and would be a much simpler substitute for SSVEP, however, the two methods have not been directly compared in an HMD in an immersive setting.