Five senses theatre project: Sharing experiences through bodily ultra-reality

The Five Senses Theatre project was established for the development of a basic technology that enables the user to relive a spatial motion of other persons as if the user him/her-self experienced it in person. This technology aims to duplicate a bodily experience performed in the real space and to pass it to the other person. In other words, the user experiences another person's body that moved in a real space as if the user moved in that real space. The spatial motion may be a walking tour to the world heritage, a legend run of a top athlete, and etc. More specifically, the system creates the sensation of a self-body motion without a voluntary motion of the user by providing physical motion to the real body. The sensation of self-body motion is generated by not only a visually induced vection but proprioceptive and tactile sensations of the body passively evoked. The Five Senses Theatre provides multisensory stimuli to the user to make use of the user's body as medium to project the valuable experience from others to the user's cognition. The research issues include the following: 1) Cognitive mechanism of passive stimulation perceived as an active motion sensation (pseudo agency), and body ownership transfer (virtual body). 2) Device development of the mutisensory display system, rendering/projection algorithms, and a lifelog data system.