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 Barcelona ( , , ) is a city on the coast of northeastern Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within ci ...

The machine to be another

The "machine" is an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

system developed by BeAnotherLab which uses a

head-mounted display A head-mounted display (HMD) is a display device, worn on the head or as part of a helmet (see Helmet-mounted display for aviation applications), that has a small display optic in front of one (monocular HMD) or each eye ( binocular HMD). An H ...

to transmit video from one person's perspective to another. The specifications for the system, including

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

, are freely available. The most recent iteration of the project uses the

Oculus Rift Oculus Rift is a discontinued line of virtual reality headsets developed and manufactured by Oculus VR, a division of Meta Platforms, released on March 28, 2016. In 2012 Oculus initiated a Kickstarter campaign to fund the Rift's development, af ...

, a

virtual reality 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 (particularly video games), educ ...

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 performer'' ''follows 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 performer'' ''transmits 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.'"

Daanish Masood, a member of BeAnotherLab and advisor at the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and international security, security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be ...

Alliance of Civilizations The United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) is an initiative that attempts to "galvanize international action against extremism" through the forging of international, intercultural dialogue, intercultural and interfaith dialogue, interre ...

, has since used the project to explore conflict resolution applications for tensions across cultural barriers.

Gender swap

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 Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most cultures u ...

from their own. The piece focuses on the interaction between the sense of

touch In physiology, the somatosensory system is the network of neural structures in the brain and body that produce the perception of touch (haptic perception), as well as temperature (thermoception), body position (proprioception), and pain. It is ...

and

vision Vision, Visions, or The Vision may refer to: Perception Optical perception * Visual perception, the sense of sight * Visual system, the physical mechanism of eyesight * Computer vision, a field dealing with how computers can be made to gain un ...

. 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. It was also awarded an honorary mention at

Ars Electronica Ars Electronica Linz GmbH is an Austrian cultural, educational and scientific institute active in the field of new media art, founded in Linz in 1979. It is based at the Ars Electronica Center (AEC), which houses the Museum of the Future, in the ...

. Because of the project's success, BeAnotherLab started a research collaboration with

the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the m ...

(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.

References

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External links

BeAnotherLab

The Machine to Be Another's Main Website

Machine To Be Another video

Gender Swap video
Technology organizations Virtual reality companies Organisations based in Barcelona

The machine to be another

Gender swap

See also

References

External links