Project from Yedan Qian and Xin Liu is a virtual reality experience where you can become a tree, and provides sense of tactility through Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS):
TreeSense is a sensory VR system that transforms a person into a tree, from a seedling to its full-size form, to its final destiny. The person experiences what it feels like to be a tree by seeing and feeling her arms turning into branches and her body into a trunk. To evoke these sensations, we put electrodes at several key locations on the user’s forearms to stimulate muscles and the skin, so that she can feel branches growing, a worm crawling, or a bird landing on her arm. This intimate, visceral experience dramatically creates an illusion of being a different life form, and thus develops a personal, immediate identification with a need of environmental protection.
