OuterBody

Purpose

After a long brainstorming session of what experience we wanted to generate for the viewers of our performance, we settled on a sense of expansion beyond the body. After giving it some thought, we wanted to be more specific: an out of body experience.

Fabrication Process

This is the first Cognitive Orgies challenge for all of us that didn't require any physical fabrication or coding. While we explored with different 3D prints for holding the iPhones, we ended up going old-school and having our Participant hold them with their hands. As such, we are going to leave this section empty, and provide the relevant information in the following two (Integrated Design and Design Process).

Integrated Design

After spending way too much time testing all the live streaming options (as described above in Design Process), we finally came across a simple, and pretty elegant way to fix our latency issues. We were inspired by the YouTube tutorial to use WebRTC streaming to reduce latency, but instead of local hosting, we used vdo.ninja urls and screen sharing on TouchDesigner as the workaround.

Another important factor was changing from an old Lenovo Laptop to a 2021 Macbook Pro with an M1 chip. This helped the reduce the latency by at least 300ms

Here's a link to a Loom Video for a walkthrough of how the TouchDesigner file works

Design Process

We started the project thinking the outer body experience as a top view of yourself. This was already something that creates a bizzare perspective.

After trying it with an initial prototype of a cardboard box and a long platic pipe, we tried this with different people to see their behaviors and reaction. This first prototype required us to use 2 phones.

Later on in the process we explored another alternative where we showed the same perspective of different people. To make them feel like they are in a different body, we covered their faces, showed them a video stream of other person's lap while touching both laps. This version required us to use 4 phones. However, later on we realized that the participants didn't get that bizzare feeling of outer body experience we aimed for.

After reviewing their feedbacks and feelings during the experience, we decided to give the control to the participant first to let them shape their own experience. This approach became our base for our final experience.

Later on, for our final choreography we used different elements from our previous prototypes and experiments.

Here you can check all the videos from our process;

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1hU2KS7k8xdhf7x3Mx2g7-tFhnGfcVlKs?usp=sharing

Performance KPIs

Environment: The experience takes place in the MDEF classroom. The deep familiarity of the room, juxtaposed with the novel point of view, leads to a sense of confusion around where "they" are and where "their body" is.

Process: The performance is carefully choreographed by the facilitators to give the participant the feeling of inhabiting another body (this happens after attempting to navigate the environment with the external eyes - see below).

Interaction: The participant uses the two phones as external eyes attached to their hands, and attempts to navigate the environment from that new perspective.

Artifact Presence: The participant should feel an affective relationship towards the artifact. It might be revulsion, fondness, or something else. The important part is that they feel something toward the artifact.Someone who didn't have the experience will not feel that same way.

Choreography:

WHAT YOU NEED:

• Participant x1
• Facilitators x3
• Phones x3
• Laptop x1

Set up two chairs, 3 meters apart.

Set up the phones and touchdesigner file (if the.toe file in the Code Section does not work, use this link from Google Drive), as described in the Loom Video (in Integrated Design).

Facilitator 1: Sit the Participant in the chair on stage right (left side if looking at the chairs head-on)

Facilitator 1: Offer the participant a cookie (or other edible treat).

"The journey will commence with the OuterBody cookie. The cookie contains the extremely safe, naturally occurring compound, Astralyne, that we harvest from abandoned bunkers on Montjuic."

Participant: Eats cookie

Facilitator 1: Place Phone 1 in their left hand

"Here is your left eye. Hold it gently."

Facilitator 1: Place Phone 2 in their right hand

"Here is your right eye. Hold it gently."

Facilitator 1: Put the phones together in front of their face.

Gently place the headset onto their head

"You are now entering the OuterBody Experience"

Facilitator 1: Prompt them to look around, and explore their surroundings.

"The cookie's effects should have kicked in by now. Don't worry, the effects are only temporary. Please look around and explore your surroundings."

Facilitator 1: If they don't stand up, prompt them to stand up and walk around.

Facilitator 1: After 30-60 seconds, prompt them to sit back down and help them sit safely.

Facilitator 1: Once seated, have them look forward.

"Please bring your eyes together and look forward"

Facilitator 1: Take their eyes and show them themselves from straight ahead at face level.

"I'm going to borrow your eyes for a second. Hold tight."

Facilitator 1: Show them themselves from many different perspectives.

Facilitator 2: Sit in the empty chair.

Facilitator 1: Walk quickly toward Facilitator 2, and put the phones into their chest until the screen is black. Hand Phone 1 to Facilitator 2.

Facilitator 3: Change the input of the phones so that only Phone 1 is streaming video to Phone 3 (the one in the headset).

Facilitator 1: Have the participant close their eyes, place their right hand behind their back, and place their left hand on their knee, palm up.

"Uh oh... it seems the cookie dosage was stronger than we calculated. To mitigate any further damages, please close your eyes. Now, place your right hand behind your back, and your left hand on your left knee, palm facing up."

Facilitator 2: Assume the same position as Participant.

Facilitator 3: Go in front of Facilitator 2

Facilitator 1: Prompt Participant to keep their eyes closed and look down.

"Now, keeping your eyes closed, tilt your head down."

Facilitator 2: Point Phone 1 toward your lap. 1st person POV.

Facilitator 1: Prompt Participant to open their eyes.

"Great, I think we've fixed it. You can open your eyes now."

Facilitator 1: Stroke the hand of Participant

Facilitator 3: Stroke the hand of Facilitator 2

"The cookie should have worn off by now. Can you feel me stroking your hand? Has anything changed?

Facilitator 1: Prompt them to look left (so that they do not see themselves in the stream, just the wall. Then prompt them to look right, so they'll see themselves.

Facilitator 2: Mimic the head turning actions of Participant

Facilitator 1: Inform Participant that we'll be taking their eyes again. Make it a bit intense.

Uh oh, umm... I think I gave you the wrong cookie. Let me borrow your eyes one more time. Please hang on.

Facilitator 3: Take the phone and show them Facilitator 2 from a heads-on perspective. Hover for a second and then zoom into the floor until the screen is black.

Facilitator 1: Prompt them to close their eyes

"Please close your eyes. We are debugging the system."

Facilitator 2: Place Larry the Rock onto the chair you were sitting on.

Facilitator 1: Get behind the Participant, prompt them to look forward and open their eyes.

"This should do the trick. Please look forward and keep your eyes closed. Now open them."

Facilitator 1 and 3: Coordinate the stroking of the rock and the head of the participant.

Facilitator 1: Let them hang out there for a few seconds, then prompt the return to body

"Oops. No, that's not right. Let's bring you back now."

Facilitator 2: Zoom the Phone out from Larry the Rock and back into the body of the Participant

Facilitator 1: Remove the goggles from the Participant.

PERFORMANCE DONE.

References

https://beanotherlab.org/home/work/tmtba/ - We referenced them heavily in the ideation of our performance, as well as the choreography.

https://hackaday.com/2014/07/02/third-person-perspective-is-guaranteed-to-mess-with-your-senses/ - Reference for our original idea of enacting 3rd person perspectives.

Reflection

We got really good results from the presentation and testing. People seemed to be really captivated by the split eye moment, as well as the inhabiting another's body moment. Becoming the rock provided nice comedic relief, but no one seemed to ever identify with the rock as their body.

For future iterations we'd like to create special gloves that Phones 1 and 2 (the separate eyes) can fit into, so that the Participant has a better experience when having "hands as eyes". We also would like to create a chest mount for Facilitator 2 that has a servo motor connected to an accelerometer in the VR headset, so that when the Participant moves their head, the phone that is feeding them the video moves at the same rate and in the same direction. That way Facilitator 2 doesn't have to try to match their movements (which can only be approximate and never match up precisely).

We would also like to play around with touchdesigner to introduce visual hallucinations that add to the narrative of the chemical compound in the magic cookie we feed the Participant in the beginning of the performance.

Cognitive Contribution License (CCL)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wh553HMvyLTC_5Em8-l6o9A3BfsFgIUf/view?usp=sharing

Team MDEF Websites

Sıla: https://kara-sila.github.io/mdef-site/about/me/

Francesco: https://mig-sketch.github.io/lavezzi-mdef/

Ayal: https://ayalbark.github.io/mdef/

Team Roles

We shared all the roles and had fun in the process :)