If a man in a white coat put a camera-equipped helmet on your head and told you to trust everything you saw as reality, wouldn’t you feel a little funny? And then wouldn’t you be a little tripped out when they took it off and had to distinguish what was actually real versus what was a recording presented as reality. For the Japanese scientists branching out into a new wing of brain science, this is the whole point. They call it “substitutional reality,” and it sounds horrifying.The key innovation of substitutional reality is its ability to produce a dreamlike state, somewhere between fantasy and reality. Much like virtual reality, substitutional reality requires the user to wear an all-encompassing helmet that controls what she sees and hears. In the lab, researchers from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute’s Laboratory for Adaptive Intelligence put a head-mounted visual display with an integrated camera, microphone and headphones onto the subject, and they pipe in a mixture of live footage from inside the lab and prerecorded scenes spliced seamlessly into the feed. A panoramic camera in the room accounts for the subject’s entire field of view.The effect blurs the subject sense of reality in a way that virtual reality never could. After all, when you’re wearing a virtual reality helmet, you know from the get-go that what you’re seeing is contrived. With substitutional reality, you’re left guessing. In a recent experiment that’s explained in a new Scientific Reports paper, researchers say that seven out of ten participants in the study couldn’t distinguish reality from the recorded images, leaving scientists to wonder what exactly is going on in the brain.“In a dream, we naturally accept what is happening and hardly doubt its reality, however unrealistic it may seem on reflection.” said Keisuke Suzuki, the lead author of the paper. “Our motivation is to explore the cognitive mechanisms underlying our strong conviction in reality. How can people trust what they perceive? Answering these questions requires an experimental platform which can present scenes that participants believe are completely real, but where we are still able to manipulate the contents.”Some people are calling the substitutional reality setup the “Inception helmet.” However, the team that’s been developing the technology insist that the technology is useful for more than dream-making. The effect created by the situational reality system is not unlike the hallucinations caused by cognitive disfunction in psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia. “We’ve already explored the so-called ‘doppelgänger’ delusion, in which participants suddenly see themselves enter the room,” Suzuki explains. “There’s much more that can be done. For example, we can use the system to manipulate the matches between expected and actual sensory inputs in highly realistic environments, probing one current theory of schizophrenia. This might allow us to regenerate schizophrenic symptoms in a controlled fashion, perhaps providing avenues for therapy. Of course, all these potential applications require a very careful consideration of the relevant ethics.”Of course, if all else fails, we can just turn this helmet-induced acid trip into performance art. Oh wait, the Japanese already did that.
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