Professor Mel Slater

Event Lab, University of Barcelona, Spain

Mel Slater DSc, is currently Distinguished Investigator at the University of Barcelona where he co-leads the Experimental Virtual Environments for Neuroscience and Technology (EVENT) Lab (www.event-lab.org). He was Professor of Virtual Environments at UCL in the Department of Computer Science. He has been involved in research in virtual reality since the early 1990s, and has been first supervisor of 38 PhDs in graphics and virtual reality since 1989. In 2005 he was awarded the Virtual Reality Career Award by IEEE Virtual Reality ‘In Recognition of Seminal Achievements in Engineering Virtual Reality.’  He has been involved in and led several international projects in this field. He held a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant TRAVERSE and two subsequent ERC Proof of Concept grants, and currently holds a new ERC Advanced grant MoTIVE. His publications can be seen on publicationslist.org/melslater. He is co-founder and CSO of the company Virtual Bodyworks S.L. www.virtualbodyworks.com.

Self-Transformation Through Virtual Embodiment

In virtual reality you can look around wherever you like, and still of course see virtual reality. What happens when you look down towards yourself or in a virtual mirror? If it has been so programmed you will see a life-sized virtual body replacing your own. You are likely then to have the perceptual illusion that the virtual body is yours, even though you know for sure that it is not. In this talk I will show how this perceptual illusion can be used for various types of self-transformation. In particular I will concentrate on ‘becoming someone else’ and how this can be useful both for self-change and support resistance to the peer pressure.

Click here for more information.