Publications related to Flight of mind: Sensorimotor and multisensory embodiment with aviation robotics, flight simulator, and virtual reality

Touch and Closeness in Naturally Organized Activities

Countless aspects of touch and closeness have been questioned in an unprecedented way during the recent Covid epidemic. Social practices as banal as greetings were both reflexively and practically challenged and sometimes deeply altered, resulting in painf ...

2024

Immersive VR for upper-extremity rehabilitation in patients with neurological disorders: a scoping review

Silvestro Micera, Elena Losanno

Background Neurological disorders, such as stroke and chronic pain syndromes, profoundly impact independence and quality of life, especially when affecting upper extremity (UE) function. While conventional physical therapy has shown effectiveness in provid ...

BioMed Central2024

Customizing the human-avatar mapping based on EEG error related potentials during avatar-based interaction

Ronan Boulic, Ricardo Andres Chavarriaga Lozano, Bruno Herbelin, José del Rocio Millán Ruiz, Olaf Blanke, Fumiaki Iwane, Thibault Serge Mario Porssut

Objective. A key challenge of virtual reality (VR) applications is to maintain a reliable human-avatar mapping. Users may lose the sense of controlling (sense of agency), owning (sense of body ownership), or being located (sense of self-location) inside th ...

2024

SORI: A softness-rendering interface to unravel the nature of softness perception

Jamie Paik, Mustafa Mete, Hwayeong Jeong

Tactile perception of softness serves a critical role in the survival, well-being, and social interaction among various species, including humans. This perception informs activities from food selection in animals to medical palpation for disease detection ...

National Academy of Sciences2024

In case of doubt, one follows one's self: the implicit guidance of the embodied self-avatar

Ronan Boulic, Bruno Herbelin, Loën Boban

The sense of embodiment in virtual reality (VR) is commonly understood as the subjective experience that one's physical body is substituted by a virtual counterpart, and is typically achieved when the avatar's body, seen from a first-person view, moves lik ...

2024

Modulation of Visually Induced Self-motion Illusions by α Transcranial Electric Stimulation over the Superior Parietal Cortex

Sylvain Jean-François Harquel

The growing popularity of virtual reality systems has led to a renewed interest in understanding the neurophysiological correlates of the illusion of self-motion (vection), a phenomenon that can be both intentionally induced or avoided in such systems, dep ...

Mit Press2024

An immersive virtual reality tool for assessing left and right unilateral spatial neglect

Olaf Blanke, Andrea Serino, Roberta Ronchi

The reported rate of the occurrence of unilateral spatial neglect (USN) is highly variable likely due to the lack of validity and low sensitivity of classical tools used to assess it. Virtual reality (VR) assessments try to overcome these limitations by pr ...

Wiley2024

Impact of a mindfulness-based intervention on neurobehavioral functioning and its association with large-scale brain networks in preterm young adolescents

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Natalia Fernandez, Petra Susan Hüppi, Vanessa Siffredi

Aim: Adolescents born very preterm (VPT;

Wiley2024

Changes in spatial self-consciousness elicit grid cell–like representation in the entorhinal cortex

Olaf Blanke, Hyeongdong Park, Hyukjun Moon, Baptiste Gauthier, Emanuela De Falco, Louis Philippe Albert, Corentin Marie Hervé Robert Tasu

Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex (EC) encode an individual’s location in space, integrating both environmental and multisensory bodily cues. Notably, body-derived signals are also primary signals for the sense of self. While studies have demonstrated th ...

2024

Out-of-body illusion induced by visual-vestibular stimulation

Bruno Herbelin, Olaf Blanke, Florian Lance, Sophie Jacqueline Andrée Betka, Hsin-Ping Wu, Estelle Nakul

Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are characterized by the subjective feeling of being located outside one's physical body and perceiving one's own body from an elevated perspective looking downwards. OBEs have been correlated with abnormal integration of bod ...

Cell Press2023

Bodily self-consciousness as a framework to link sensory information and self-related components of episodic memory: behavioral, neuroimaging, and clinical evidence

Nathalie Heidi Meyer

The recollection of sensory information and subjective experience related to a personal past event depends on our episodic memory (EM). At the neural level, EM retrieval is linked with the reinstatement of hippocampal activity thought to recollect the sens ...

EPFL2023

From finger animation to full-body embodiment of avatars with different morphologies and proportions

Mathias Guy Delahaye

VR (Virtual Reality) is a real-time simulation that creates the subjective illusion of being in a virtual world. This thesis explores how integrating the user's body and fingers can be achieved and beneficial for the user to experience VR. At the advent of ...

EPFL2023

Neuronal correlates of goal-directed sensorimotor transformation in sensory, motor and higher-order cortical areas

Anastasiia Oryshchuk

An important function of the brain is to interpret incoming sensory information from the outside world to guide adaptive behavior. Understanding how and where sensory information is transformed into motor commands in a context- and learning-dependent manne ...

EPFL2023

Saliency prediction in 360° architectural scenes: Performance and impact of daylight variations

Marilyne Andersen, Sabine Süsstrunk, Kynthia Chamilothori, Bahar Aydemir, Caroline Karmann, Seungryong Kim

Saliency models are image-based prediction models that estimate human visual attention. Such models, when applied to architectural spaces, could pave the way for design decisions where visual attention is taken into account. In this study, we tested the pe ...

2023

Microgravity induces overconfidence in perceptual decision-making

Davide Scaramuzza, Christian Pfeiffer, Leyla Loued-Khenissi

Does gravity affect decision-making? This question comes into sharp focus as plans for interplanetary human space missions solidify. In the framework of Bayesian brain theories, gravity encapsulates a strong prior, anchoring agents to a reference frame via ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Me, Myself, and I: Neural Activity for Self versus Other across Development

Solange Noémie Jeanne Denervaud, Paola Zanchi

Although adults and children differ in self-vs.-other perception, a developmental perspective on this discriminative ability at the brain level is missing. This study examined neural activation for self-vs.-other in a sample of 39 participants spanning fou ...

MDPI2023

Hydraulically Amplified Electrostatic Taxels (HAXELs) for Full Body Haptics

Herbert Shea, Edouard Franck Vincent Gustave Leroy

The ability to mechanically stimulate touch receptors over the entire body is a key feature for fully immersive and highly realistic virtual reality experience. Haptic stickers, flexible arrays of HAXELs (hydraulically amplified TAXels), that enable cutane ...

Wiley2023

'connEcted caesarean section': creating a virtual link between MOthers and their infanTs to ImprOve maternal childbirth experieNce - study protocol for a PILOT trial (e-motion-pilot)

Sandra Maria Marcadent, Karine Lepigeon, Fiona Corbaz, David Desseauve

IntroductionOne-third of mothers rate their childbirth as traumatic. The prevalence of childbirth-related post-traumatic stress disorder (CB-PTSD) is 4.7%. Skin-to-skin contact is a protective factor against CB-PTSD. However, during a caesarean section (CS ...

BMJ PUBLISHING GROUP2023

EEG signature of breaks in embodiment in VR

Ronan Boulic, Ricardo Andres Chavarriaga Lozano, Bruno Herbelin, José del Rocio Millán Ruiz, Olaf Blanke, Fumiaki Iwane, Thibault Serge Mario Porssut

The brain mechanism of embodiment in a virtual body has grown a scientific interest recently, with a particular focus on providing optimal virtual reality (VR) experiences. Disruptions from an embodied state to a less- or non-embodied state, denominated Br ...

2023

Systematic design of a multi-input multi-output controller by model-based decoupling: a demonstration on TCV using multi-species gas injection

Basil Duval, Christian Gabriel Theiler, Cristian Galperti, Artur Perek

In this paper, we present the first results of a systematically designed multi-input multi-output gas-injection controller on Tokamak a Configuration Variable (TCV). We demonstrate the simultaneous real-time control of the NII emission front position and l ...

IOP Publishing Ltd2023