Bizarre Fusion Body Surrogacy System Lets You Dive Into Someone Else's Body

One of the stranger movies that I have seen in recent memory is the flick called "Gamer" where a gamer is able to take over the body of a human prison inmate and use them to play a real-life video game where a loss means the prisoner dies. Researchers have developed a new system that is as close as we have come to the tech in "Gamer" and the system is called Fusion.

The researchers involved in the project say that the Fusion system is a remotely operated wearable system that allows one person to dive into the body of another person. The system shares the same point of view of a surrogate and an operator. Surrogates can be controlled by that remote operator using the mechanical arms of the wearable suit to perform remote assisting and supporting scenarios.

There are three levels of what the researchers call "bodily driven communications" including direct, enforced, and induced. Researchers say that the Fusion system could allow a remote operator to adjust the physical posture of the trainee by forcing the surrogate's body to the correct posture. The trainer might also guide the body movement by inducing forces that make the trainee follow a certain route or sequence of actions.

Fusion has two different types of hands depending on the collaboration scenario being used. One type of hand is a humanoid hand attached the Fusion's arms for general and independent collaboration. The Fusion arms can also be mounted to the surrogate's wrists for assistive collaboration using what appear to be Velcro straps.

Fusion requires the surrogate to wear a backpack with three axes including a robotic head with stereo vision and binaural audio and a pair of anthropomorphic arms with six degrees of freedom. The operator uses an off-the-shelf HMD, specified as an Oculus CV1 Headset in the test system.

SOURCE: Researchgate (PDF)