Blended Reality: Extending Existence to Multiple Realities

めっちゃ面白そうな博論

稲見研かな?

KMD時代の稲見先生の教え子ってことか

We propose a concept of perceiving reality and self, Blended Reality, which blends multiple alternate realities across temporal and spatial domains and human bodily perception, with the vision of expanding the boundary of human perception of reality.

However, these researches in alternate realty, be it in VR, augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), or telexistence, have always adhered to one principle - the one-to-one mapping of a human’s self to the reality. These one-to-one mapping is successful in inducing an immersive sense of presence in one alternate reality, thereby enabling humans to go beyond the limitation of the surrounding live reality. We believe, however, that the boundary imposed by the one reality is not altered. We therefore take the approach of expanding this boundary by blending realities, by looking at the self-reality relation from a new perspective.

いや〜〜、めっちゃ良い

We first evaluated Blended Reality focusing on the humans tendency to distinguish between realities, and the sense of presence in them.

確かに

blendされた状態のを「一つのreality」と捉えるのではなく、複数のrealityがblendされたと認識されるにはどうすればいいのか

そう認識されることはどんなimplicationを持つのか

みたいなことが気になってくる

The philosophical paradigm shift from the Cartesian era, where reality is perceived through mind, to phenomenology and embodiment, as developed by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, has great influence on how we develop our technology.

Taking robotics as an example, traditional robotics in the 1950s to 1980s relied heavily on artificial intelligence where robots move about and complete tasks in the world through processing symbolic representations as according to the old Cartesian philosophical views. However, in the 1980s, Brooks demonstrated Thelen’s philosophical view of dynamical systems theory from robotics and suggested subsumption architecture, a new theory of robotics intelligence where sensors of a robot is directly linked to motors of a robot.22 Embodied robots discard the need of complex artificial intelligence algorithms in favour of simplicity of sensori-motor actions, where robots actually perform better in sub-behaviours, e.g. avoiding objects, which can then be formed into complete behaviour. Similar to robotics, the technology of how we perceive a reality is also greatly influenced, which we shall discuss in section

なるほど、シンプルに入力と出力の関係さえ定めれば、環境の中でのdynamicなロボットの動きを規定できるみたいな？

それが認識論のparadigmと一致しているとしたらめっちゃおもろい

本当かは科学史的な考証必要な気もするけど

Based on these scientific phenomenons, we can state that our perception of reality could be greatly influenced by sensory experience, logical reasoning, and embodiment, which is in accordance to philosophical view as depicted in section 1.2.

現実からVRに移る時には必ずdiscreteな変化があって、それが没入感を阻害する

To achieve a truly immersive experience, the barrier between the live reality and the alternate reality has to be lifted so the users do not know when the live reality ends and when the alternate reality experience starts.

あ〜〜、なるほど

そういう方向性でblended realityの価値を主張するのね

As technologies emerge, which provide us with more means of immersing ourselves in alternate realities, we can begin to question whether self is actually unified with our biological body. For example, in a complete immersive VR system where all of our five sensory organs are stimulated by the computer and our perception of reality is that the computer-generated world is the actual reality, would we still consider our self as situated in the biological body, which remains in the physical reality, although we receive no sensory feedback from the physical reality via our biological body. Or rather, is our self an abstract substance which can be disassociated from our biological body and be situated at a reality which is purely artificial. Consequently, if our self could be either embodied in the physical reality or VR, then we could begin to see that the perception of reality in term contributes to our embodiment of self, and since we are accustomed to be only in one reality, we believed self to be one.

こういう哲学的な問いが考えられる

これに、engineering/実験で答えを出そうとするのかな

blended realityをやった時に、selfはどうなるかというのがresearch focus?

個が複数のrealityに分裂したりするのか

We see this as a reflection back to phenomenology and embodied cognition, whereby blending multiple Cartesian worlds, and enabling interactions for each, could construct our expanded perception of reality boundary.

やることは以下の3点かな

そもそもどうすればblended realityが作れるのかを見出して、design principleを打ち立てる

それを観察して、selfやrealityがどうなるのか検証する

応用や社会実装を探る