Out of body

Out-of-body experiment setup (made largely redundant by modern VR tech)

Situations like the rubber-hand illusion show compellingly that external stimuli can be incorporated into the body schema. The is part of a broader phenomenon known as 'observed touch'. Compelling whole-body versions of this effect can be induced by allowing an observer to see the movements of their body from an out-of-body perspective, or by making them appear to have a different body altogether (see this cool 'Becoming Barbie' paper. 

This sort of protocol (removing the locus of your visual feedback from the location of your head) can actually be set up reasonably cheaply. To do this, you need 

1. A GoPro Camera (I have a Hero 3+ Black edition)

2. A video headset (I have a Vuzix iWear)

3. A micro HDMI -> HDMI converter cable (the longer the better - I have a 5m one from KabelDirekt)

4. A female HDMI -> female HDMI adaptor. 

And that's it. No computer. Costs less than £300.

When the GoPro is turned on, if connected to a monitor of any sort (such as the video headset), it will go into live stream mode. This mode will give the wearer a high-resolution, low-latency experience which is completely portable (assuming you have both the camera and the headset well charged). 

Place the GoPro on top of the video headset to give a roughly 1st-person perspective. Place it on a table beside the actor to get a 3rd-person perspective. Or place it on the head of a separate confederate participant facing the wearer, to get the perspective of another interacting with them (try shaking hands with yourself). Lots of different experimental paradigms have come up with interesting out-of-body paradigms, so this setup could help you easily adapt these experimental paradigms or simply use it as a device for public engagement.

Different GoPros will no doubt have different resolutions - key to a good effect seems to be a wide field of view and a high frame rate. I find 60FPS and 1080p Superview the best combination of outputs I can get out of my camera. I suspect the more you spend on the camera and video headset, the better the functional resolutions will be.

Your only limitation here is the length of the HDMI cable connecting the camera to the video headset. There's also a wireless bundle which you can get which presumably would provide even more freedom, but might increase the lag such that it's a poor trade off.

Next technical challenge for this project will be to try to feed separate inputs into each eye of the video headset - then with two GoPro cameras separated by an eye-width you could create a compelling effect of depth (and probably some nauseating sensations by moving them in isolation from one another). But with the Vuzix this is an wiring challenge beyond me.