[emilga]

At Phaenomenta in Flensburg there's an interesting exhibit that breaks the link between tactile sensation and visual perception:

An oval is placed flat on a table, so that you can touch it and feel it's shape.

Above it, and parallel to the table, is a lens that distorts the oval so that it looks perfectly circular.

When you trace the shape with your finger and keep your eyes closed, it feels like an oval.

When you trace the shape by looking through the lens, it both looks and feels like you're tracing a circle. The feeling persisted when I used my fingers to grip it.

Only by cupping it with my whole hand did it start feeling like an oval again, despite still looking circular. Pretty cool and weird!

[ogig]

This experience seems the same as most described in this very interesting and recent article about virtual embodiment [1]. Seems like we didn't need VR helmets to realize it after all.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/02/are-we-already...

[cmehdy]

A few years ago, I was lucky to work with the brilliant Japanese researchers at the Cyber Interface Lab/Hirose-Tanikawa lab (The University of Tokyo).

Amongst their projects (involving AR, VR and multi-modal devices), some students explored various ways to play with our perceptions and define more sharply the interactions and priorities of our senses. Incredible experiments involving simple contraptions as well as more advanced VR, and a lot of scientific creativity (see [1], particularly Multimodal interfaces)

Amongst those projects, Yuki Ban's "Magic Pot" was very similar to what you described, and I remember being almost upset at the realization that the sense we tend to trust the most (vision) can also drive us in the wrong direction the fastest. (see [2] and [3] for more info)

[1] http://www.cyber.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/projects/

[2] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2343470

[3] http://www.drunk-boarder.com/works/magicpot/

[dustingetz]

in drumming there is this idea of separating your hands, with training you can play uncoordinated rhythms simultaneously but without training this is very difficult. humans train their whole lives to integrate signals but this is the opposite. i wonder if in VR we will separate the senses