How the Avatar Machine Works

Introduction to How the Avatar Machine Works

Unless you've had an out-of-body expe­rience, you've spent your whole life experiencing everything from the first-person perspective. But what if you could step outside your body temporarily and experience life from a more remote point of view? That's a question that interested a design student named Marc Owens, who invented a device called the Avatar Machine in an attempt to create this kind of experience.

In terms of computer games and virtual environments, an avatar is a digital representation of a real human being. Avatars can be almost anything as long as an actual person controls them. By contrast, digital characters or creatures under the control of a computer are called bots.

If you've ever played a video game like World of Warcraft (WOW), Tomb Raider or Grand Theft Auto, you know about games that use a third-person perspective. In a third-person perspective game, you can see the character you're playing. In most games like this, the standard camera position is above and behind the character, as if you were floating a few feet behind it. Owens designed the Avatar Machine to let users see themselves from this perspective as if they were characters within a virtual environment.

Owens has said that the MMORPG WOW specifically inspired his invention. The device only really requires a harness and helmet, but Owens didn't stop there -- he designed a full costume. He added long spikes on the helmet as well as a red padded section on the upper back of the torso, brown arm bands, black gloves and puffy white pants. The costume resembles the sort of fantasy characters you'd encounter in WOW.

Owens has said that the MMORPG WOW specifically inspired his invention [source: Régine Debatty]. The device only really requires a harness and helmet, but Owens didn't stop there -- he designed a full costume. He added long spikes on the helmet as well as a red padded section on the upper back of the torso, brown arm bands, black gloves and puffy white pants. The costume resembles the sort of fantasy characters you'd encounter in WOW.

About the Inventor
Marc Owens graduated from the University of Brighton with a B.A. in 3-D Design before continuing his education at the Royal College of Art. In his studies, he concentrates on projects related to concepts like identity and ethics. He has designed several inventions that help him observe how human interaction with objects can affect emotions. These include an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) light switch (a digital device that counts the number of times someone turns a light on or off) and a silicon surgical light (part of a visceral, interactive experience that tests how people react to cutting into an inanimate object).

Avatar Machine Hardware

Apart from the costume elements of the invention, which were included to give the Avatar Machine the appearance of a video game character, the device includes:

* A harness that straps to the user's torso
* Three two-meter long aluminum rods that attach to the user's harness at the lower back and shoulders, forming a tripod
* A wide-angle pinhole video camera at the end of the tripod, not to be confused with a simple pinhole camera used in photography
* A head-mounted display (HMD) contained in a helmet
* A power supply attached to the harness

Owens' wide-angle pinhole video camera was an excellent choice for this type of application. Not only are pinhole video cameras small -- they are often used in covert surveillance operations because they're hard to spot -- but they also have infinite fixed focus with the proper lens. You can't adjust the focus on a fixed-focus camera, but the camera is designed so that all objects beyond a certain point remain in focus no matter how far away they might be.

The wide-angle lens on the camera is necessary to make sure that the user can see enough of him or herself in the frame. Wide-angle lenses have shorter focal lengths than normal lenses. The focal length is the distance between the lens and the charge-coupled device (CCD), a semiconductor image sensor in the camera that creates video images by interpreting the intensity of light coming through the lens.

The shorter focal length allows Owens to set his camera in a fixed position only three feet behind the user. Without the wide-angle lens, he would have had to make the tripod longer to get the same angle of view, making the Avatar Machine more difficult to use.

Owens' head-mounted display is a helmet that contains a monitor. A user wearing the Avatar Machine sees a video image of his or her back. The helmet doesn't have any integrated tracking systems, which means that if the user turns his or her head, the point of view doesn't change. He or she can only change the point of view by moving forward, backward or turning his or her torso in another direction.

While the padded suit isn't necessary for the invention to work, it provides a helpful layer of padding for clumsy users. Owens observed that most people took a few minutes to get used to the Avatar Machine's interface before moving around comfortably in it.

Avatar Machine Applications

Owens' fascination regarding the boundaries between virtual and physical environments was instrumental in his design of the Avatar Machine. Much of his research focuses on how people behave differently within a virtual space from how they do in real life. The Avatar Machine blurs the lines between the digital and physical worlds, particularly for people who are familiar with third-person video games.

Sociologists and psychologists might find the Avatar Machine useful when studying human behavior. Owens theorizes that people might feel a diminished sense of social responsibility when wearing the Avatar Machine. He believes users might also feel a sense of invincibility when viewing themselves from a third-person perspective. Through the Avatar Machine, users might experience a sense of disconnection from their physical presence.

Owens thinks that the disconnected feeling users experience could lead to interesting behaviors, many of which are rare in real life but common in the world of video games. Users might become less self-conscious and behave in ways they normally wouldn't in public. This behavior could range from dancing and striking silly poses to acting like a bully toward other people.

Another application for the Avatar Machine is as a form of entertainment. The Avatar Machine has the potential to become a high-tech game or toy. When users tested the Avatar machine, Owens observed that they seemed to enjoy possessing the physical characteristics and traits of a creature much larger and more powerful than themselves. He also saw that many of them had fun observing the reactions of passers-by. It's not hard to imagine the Avatar Machine becoming a curiosity at a high-tech amusement park.

Out of Body, Back in Five Minutes
Scientists are using techniques similar to the Avatar Machine to induce out-of-body experiences in normal, healthy subjects. At Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale, an education, research and technology institution in Lausanne, Switzerland, scientists used virtual reality gear to give people the sensation of being in another body. In one version of the experiment, each subject entered a room and put on a pair of virtual reality goggles. A camera behind the subject projected a virtual image of the person as if he or she were standing six feet in front of him or herself. A scientist would gently touch the subject using a stick while the subject viewed a video feed of a virtual stick stroking the illusory image of his or her body. Many subjects reported a sense of being inside the illusory bodies several feet away. Similar experiments have shown that when different sensory data -- like sight and touch -- don't match up, the sense of being within a physical body can disappear.