Also just read Andrew's post

Thanks to David, Niomi and Andrew for their helpful posts. I have one thought to add.

In talking about how to give participants in our experiment a sense of being in a bounded space, i.e. a room, we seem to have ended up talking about giving them a second "artificial sense organ", in additon to a first one that would be geared to perceiving objects in these room. But I wonder if this added complication is necessary. It would be preferable, it seems to me, to think of room-boundaries as constraints on the first prosthetic sense organ, rather than objects perceived via a second prosthetic. (This might be more of a difference in how we think about this than in how we implement it.) 

I'm thinking of two ways in which boundaries might constrain the participant's perceptions. One is to constrain her movements. (Since perception occurs via movement, this is also a constraint on perception.) The other is to have boundaries that constrain or block the "line of sight" of her prosthetic sense. The simplest version of this would be to only allow perception of objects that are in the same room as the participant; a more complex version would allow perception of objects in other roms through doorways or windows (not sure how to implement this exactly).

I think it would be interesting to implement these two different kinds of constraint both separately and together. This way we could find out if boundaries that are opaque to perception, but porous to movement, are enough to generate a sense of "roominess"; or if transparent boundaries that prevent movement are sufficient; or if both together are needed.

I'm trying to avoid assuming in advance that we know what a room-boundary is. We're all familiar with walls, but what is it about walls that generates roominess? What, again, are the mimumum conditions a boundary requires in order to generate a room? Ideally I'd like to be able to watch the room-structure generate itself out of the dynamics of perception and navigation, rather than being decided it too much in advance. (This may be overly ambitious, but it's at least the direction I'd like to aim in.)

As far as implementing boundaries that prevent movement goes, I can see two different options broadly speaking: boundaries that physically impede the movement of participants, in the way that ordinary walls do; and signals, which let the participant know she's hit a wall, and that she should not continue in that direction. Now this signal could very well be a buzzer on the feet, so it seems we're back where we started. But I want to mark a distinction here which I think is important, between a sense organ and a signal. The prosthetic that's geared toward locating objects in space is supposed to be a sense organ in a fairly robust sense, which generates a sense of moving and perceiving in a three-dimensional space. But we don't necessarily need a whole other sense organ to locate walls with; we might only need some way of indicating to the participant that she's hit a wall, and thus constraining (albeit voluntarily) her movement.

Looking forward to discussing all this more with you all tomorrow.
Noah


On Nov 26, 2010, at 4:42 PM, David Morris wrote:

Thanks to Niomi and Andrew for these thoughts—I`ve only been able to just glance over, but they look rich and insightful.

NB I`d been thinking about something in the soles too, on the basis of Berthoz`s book; next to our inner ear, apparently some of the most important balance and acceleration sensing goes on in our feet.

I`d also been thinking about a bungee cord in some kind of payout system that measures how much cord is paid out and brakes it, to create a limit on movement. But I was worried about tangles, and kinks, etc. Unless we mounted it to the top of the head. Which would be odd.

Hope to spend some more time on this soon….

bon weekend,….

From:
 owner-memory-place@concordia.ca [mailto:owner-memory-place@concordia.ca] On Behalf Of Niomi Anna Cherney
Sent: November-26-10 12:38 PM
To: memory-place@concordia.ca; post@memoryplace.posterous.com
Subject: Also just read Andrew's post

Sorry all, was writing when Andrew posted. I think Andrew's sole sensor idea is genius and maybe gets around some of the problems I pose in my response. 

-- 
Niomi Anna Cherney
Master of Arts (Special Individualized Program) Candidate
Concordia University
n_cherne@live.concordia.ca