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Comment by skgough | Hacker News Reader

I remember a video years ago that showed a device you put on your head that could affect your balance using electrical signals directed at your inner ear. They were demoing it in this news report as a human remote control sort of thing. You could control the direction the people wearing it were walking using a wireless joystick. I want to say everyone was Japanese but they could've been from anywhere in Asia. Hopefully somebody can dig it up.

I wonder if there has been any progress on increasing the capabilities of that system. It could just be another component attached to the HMD. I bet as it is now though, even with improvements, it would make you sick, which VR already has trouble with.

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This technology is called galvanic vestibular stimulation and I found a relatively recent paper that actually tried to reduce VR motion sickness using it

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9714040 https://youtu.be/z91PZpejFeE?feature=shared

Pretty neat

I experimented with this (counts fingers) OH! Ahem. Uhm, 8 years ago. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-just-hacked-my-brain-sean-m...

Excerpt: "The sensation is undeniable. The direction of the tip is dependent on the direction of the current, as evidenced by just swapping the electrodes. Obviously, since these were batteries, this was a DC current. Sensation grew stronger over a brief period of time until it saturated. It sort of feels like someone pushing or pulling you over, except there is no tug on your arm. The ramp-up in the feeling made me think of charging a small capacitor."

I remember it pretty clearly even today, which is weird because I tend to but remember this very well, but maybe it was just the excitement of the experiment. It was a relatively strong effect, and it was fairly easy to achieve (of I could do it with my crude setup, a real product should have no problem), but there were some distinct issues.

First of all, there was a lag in response, and it was a pretty large one. IIRC, it took at least half a second before I started noticing any change after turning on the current.

Next, it was fairly binary, and single axis. I could tilt left/right, but that was it, no front/back. It took time to ramp up to full tilt, and then I could only achieve about 50% tilt.

I briefly forgot what I was working with and thought I might try to limit the sensation by pulse width modulation of electrical signal. That was quite a shock! I mean that seriously!

Anyway, I came away from the experience feeling slightly nauseous and that GVS was too limited to work out.

That's neat, would love that for VR as I can easily get sick from motion that isn't 1:1 with IRL movement.

Even if it controlled your vestibular system perfectly, it unfortunately wouldn't help. You need your sense of balance to stand and walk. If you mess with it too much you will hit the floor very quickly. Physics isn't fooled.

You could imagine supporting yourself with a harness so you wouldn't fall, but certainly you can also imagine that constantly struggling against a harness won't feel like natural walking either.

And there's also proprioception that will sense that your limbs are not moving in the way your inner ear predicts they should. Proprioception can't be fooled. If it could your limbs would get out of sync with your brain and who knows what chaos would result.

Unfortunately we won't be running around freely in arbitrary VR environments until the invention of The Matrix's brain jack. So, not likely within our lifetimes.

The first chapter from The Brain That Changes Itself is about a woman who couldn't walk because of some bacteria (iirc?) that attacked something in her inner ear that wound up destroying her balance. The chapter is a story about attaching electrodes to her tongue connected to a helmet with accelerometers that helped restore her sense of balance. Initially the effect persisted for a short time after removing the helmet and electrodes. With subsequent sessions the duration got longer and longer and after several years her balance was completely normal again.

Actually, proprioception can be fooled quite easily. There are a number of different examples involving phantom limbs, vestigial tails, redirected walking, etc.

Almost none of the human senses are absolute. They are holistic, subjective, and relative to experience (both recent and past), culture, age, etc. Honestly, the fact that we can get any semblance of objective communication of our senses together, based on how wonky and unreliable the individual parts can be, is amazing.

There was a thing called OtoTech talked about on Reddit years ago that I think people were making DIY versions of. It was supposed to cure motion sickness without using electrical stimulation I believe, but it's been a long time since I've looked into it much and the company never made consumer versions but stuck to military and medical stuff.

I was excited about this too! They're going the FDA route so expect it sometime before the heat death of the universe, if your insurance covers it. https://otolithlabs.com/

https://youtu.be/OlXYqfQHNuA

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