Mounia, thank you for sharing the InGrid concept and references. What I found most meaningful was the wording here: “We believe that the embodied experience depends on the permanence (temporary or not) of the object in the embodied space and the changes that can bring within sensorimotor contingencies. This can be obtained by having a completely immerged user in the space of interaction. By analogy, interactive tabletops can be experienced as an extension of the body because not only the users are immerged in the sensorimotor space but also through the space of shared and private knowledge. The sensorimotor contingencies of interactive tabletops represent the space of actions and sensations that can be defined by extracting the sensorimotor invariants in both peripersonal and extrapersonal spaces” (p. 4).
Are you envisioning this technology for the early classroom? It seems it would be such a potential way to break through very young conceptual boundaries between where the functional self ends and the group-enabled self begins (in the Piagetian sense). Two things very much stand out: one is your mention of pericutaneous space (how the sense of self extends through the tools and interfaces we use to their boundaries and a bit beyond), and the other was body ownership (functional permanence and what one might call identity-separability). Can you affirm my guess that you see these facilitating mechanisms as a means to extend proprioception and subsequent efficacy, and that any break in reinforcing modalities (space, vision, tactile feedback, control locus) severs this illusion? If so I am much in agreement and this was brought home to me during my research on illusion therapy (please see Henrik Ehrsson’s research and Ramachandran’s synaethesia connection as well).
As individuals, we urgently need meaningful confirmations that everything is okay, that we can effect positive changes for ourselves and our surrounds like anticipation of personal growth and retained control. The self does not end at luminal sensation, but at estimates of personal reach. It seems to me, belief for us is not just “passive change-response" (one for one) but "hopeful, step-responses" similar to the metaphor of keeping our belief in the air like a balloon. It is not easy if we lose attention on our goal to sustain our belief, but it gets easier as we add "more hands in the air" in this attempt (additional modalities as you indicate – touch, sound, what you so aptly call immergence). For those that remember the movie (Somewhere in Time), like Chris Reeve’s seeing the penny from the future, it takes only one disconsonant proof to undo a stream of very hopeful, consonant affirmations – such that now confirmation frequency becomes confirmation urgency instead - to anxiously regain lost belief. For children and therapy, it is not difficult to see how helpful the InGrid and similar designs might be in bridging the peripersonal space of childhood to the socially-buttressed extended space needed to succeed in life (to contribute individually and see the collectively beneficial goal).
Reference
Ziat, M., Fancher, J., Kilpela, K, Fridstrom, J., & Clark, J. J. (2013, April-May). InGrid: Rethinking the Embodied Space. Paper to be presented at ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Paris, France.
Conference Paper InGrid: Rethinking the Embodied Space
Thanks so much Mounia for your reply and the additional video link. It is greatly helpful to see InGrid in use like this. Your mention of the pericutaneous space being composed of tools that have become proprioceptively mapped as limb extensions (spatially predicted and affecting "reach velocity") reminded me of some links I enjoyed exploring. Here they are in case you too might find them interesting (unless you have already). The one missing dimension of limb extension via tools seems to be the tactile confirmation along the entire span (even if the kinesthetic is there) which seems apparent in Flor et al. -- perhaps ranged by the skin cells themselves? What do you think? I would much appreciate your thoughts on this, and/or how you might be adding touch to the InGrid design as well. Again, thank you for your kind replies.
Flor, H., Denke, C., Schaefer, M., Grüsser, S. (2001). Effect of sensory discrimination training on cortical reorganisation and phantom limb pain. The Lancet, 357(9270), 1763-1764. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(00)04890-X.
Franz, E. A., & Ramachandran, V. S. (1998). Bimanual coupling in amputees with phantom limbs. Nature Neuroscience, 1(6), 443-444. doi:10.1038/2161.
Schmalzl, L., Thomke, E., Ragnö, C., Nilseryd, M., Stockselius, A., & Ehrsson, H. (2011). Pulling telescoped phantoms out of the stump: Manipulating the perceived position of phantom limbs using a full-body illusion. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 5(121), 1-12. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2011.00121.
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