dessalles

Not sure how I came across it, but I’m absolutely mesmerized by this goal Alexander Ovechkin scored a couple years ago. If you look closely, I think you can spot the exact moment his consciousness exits his body in need of a better angle from which to manipulate his arm and its wooden prosthesis. In the paranormal sciences, the phenomenon of seeing oneself from a third-person perspective is known as Astral Projection. In neurology it’s referred to as Out-of-Body Experience (OBE). I’ve always argued that sport - a mapping of artificial rules and fabricated contexts into powerful and precise physical movements - is by far the most mentally demanding of human activities. And so it didn’t surprise me when I started hearing sports psychologist describe visualization and mental rehearsal as effective techniques for athletic development. I imagine the process of practicing via mental imagery, instead of physical practice, is a form of OBE training - conditioning the mind to visualize oneself from the third-person during competition.

Being an experience designer, I suppose I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how people experience things; so I’m drawn to this idea of out-of-body experiences. The thought of enhancing a product experience by inducing what some consider to be a neurological disorder, and what others understand to be wandering astral bodies, is entirely alluring. But with some seriousness, out-of-body experiences aren’t too far removed from the interaction design concept of an interface’s mental model. Particularly in more immersive interactive experiences, it’s thought to be fairly critical users have what amounts to an out-of-body image of the entire interface. When on-screen elements are organized spatially, a users ability to place their current view of the interface into a larger cognitive map is what prevents disorientation. This idea is largely inherited from urban planning theory. Navigating a city, like navigating an interface, requires some ability to map a group of immediate landmarks and visual cues to a broader mental image of a landscape. The absence of that mapping is typically accompanied by the sensation of being lost.

So one of the challenges interaction designers face when designing immersive experiences is constructing users’ cognitive maps of the interface as quickly as possible. There are a number of techniques to accomplish this. Obviously, the most basic of them is to just present an actual map (i.e. the “you are here” technique). But we might not want a map on-screen at all times. So let’s say, for example, we present users with a map and then smoothly transition users into their first-person view within that space. Unfortunately, with this method we’re relying more heavily on users’ memory, which is notoriously unreliable. So I wonder what techniques can be used to induce a sensation to the effect of OBE in order to assist recall of these out-of-body mental models?

A 2004 paper published by a group of neurology researchers from the University Hospital of Geneva discusses the inverse of OBE, which is known as Autoscopy. That is, instead of floating in a space outside your actual body, you believe to see your body in a location other than your actual location.

The paper includes this patient depiction of experienced autoscopy:

Fig. 3 Graphical depiction of experienced AS (as drawn by Patient 4). The patient divided his experience in two periods (A,B). In the initial period, he experienced being elevated in his living room chair into the air by 3 m in the direction of the arrow (A). In the second period, he experienced a ‘second’ body, which continued to be elevated, but left the patient’s body from the elevated position in the chair (see text). (C) depicts the visual scene as Patient 4 experienced seeing it from his elevated position in the chair.

Hmmm…frame C looks a lot like what we’re after - a bird’s eye map of a physical environment. Autoscopic interfaces? Indeed.