Remote-controlled humans at Siggraph

One of the stranger things spotted at Siggraph this year can be found here...

Remote controlled humans might sound a bizarre and nightmarish prospect, but Japanese researchers hope to harness the trick for computer gaming.

By remotely stimulating a person's vestibular system - the fluid-filled tubes in the inner ear that guide their sense of balance - with electrodes placed on the skin just below the ear, researchers at NTT's research laboratories in Kanagawa have found a way to turn humans into oversized radio controlled vehicles.

The technique, known as galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS), unbalances a person so that they automatically veer left or right in an attempt to rebalance themselves. The NTT team developed a headset and a control unit similar to that used with remote-controlled toy cars.

Here is a video of a girl being driven around like a RC car.

Clearly this tech isn't something you can go pick up at Best Buy yet but it could make its way into a new generation of Head Mounted Displays that put more reality in VR.

Taro Maeda and colleagues at NTT believe the system could primarily be used to make computer games feel more realistic. In a driving game, for example, a player could feel gravity shift as their car hurtles through a tight bend.

"I do think this could find an application in computer gaming," says James Collins, an expert in GVS at Boston University in the US. "You could definitely use it to give the illusion of motion when going through some virtual environment."

Add in some voice recognition and better voice chat capabilities and you start to paint the picture for an entire new user interface with direct implications for the design and gameplay for future MMO games.