1. Project number and Title 10 Inducing Out-of-Body Experiences by Visual, Auditory and Tactile Sensor Modality Manipulation 2. Should this project be considered for the Best Project award? (yes/no) yes 3. Should this project be considered for the top 3 project awards? (yes/no) yes 4. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the overall organization/clarity of the project report? (1-10) 8 5. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the overall project idea? (1-10) 9 6. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the overall research contribution of the project idea, methodology and/or results? (1-10) 9 Then write approximately 2 pages of helpful feedback to the project's author(s). The following questions should help you organize your feedback: * Overall, is the project report clear, concise, and well-organized? Yes, the work put into constructing sections, formatting and a proper table of contents was appreciated. Plenty of citations of previous work showed you knew what was current in the field and the introduction to previous research * How does the project idea and methodology fit within the framework of Developmental Robotics? * Describe what you like BEST about the project? The inherit coolness and the high rate of OBE creation in the endgame. In other words, you chose a fun and interesting topic, but made it your own with the invention of the auditory OBE and teased out good results in the end. Nice work for a single semester. * Describe what you like LEAST about the project? Lack of focus on experiment 2, though this was likely due to time constraints. Can't get over how awesome a lateral movement of the head combined with a moving sound source would be. Hope you get a chance to continue with this research. * Do the methods, results and contributions of the final project correspond to what was presented in the initial project proposal? Yes, exactly what was proposed is what was implemented, down to the last detail. Except for the ability to pan the virtual head. * Are there any major details left out with regards to the methods, algorithms, or experimental design described in the report? Lack of positional graph in the second experiment, otherwise all parts of the completed experiments were well represented. * Do the experimental results reported in the paper demonstrate success? Yes, albeit few strong conclusions were drawn. For the second and more interesting experiment, position graphs and other analysis was left, probably understandably due to time constraints. Overall, a 50% success rate seems very significant in creating OBEs, despite imperfections in the test setup. Great job. * Do you have any suggestions for improvement and future work? The mentioned tests of dimishing returns in OBEs is certainly work futher experimentation. It would be interesting to look further into those who did not experience any type of OBE at all and perhaps find a few reasons why it didn't work for them specifically. Expand experiment two. This seems to be original research, experiment one is only to verify that your setup works similarly to past research, you need to focus the majority of your time on expanding this new idea. Whether it be different kinds of sounds, seeing if you can produce a startle reflex by physically poking the virtual body after creating an OBE or any other number of extensions that explore the cross-modality inheirit in your new methodology of OBE induction. Implement at least a 2 degree of freedom virtual head to follow the movement of the user's head. This would not be an incredibly easy task, but one idea would be to use the already mechanized head of Dr. Stoytchev's robot as the virtual head. It already has servo's for movement and properly placed microphones and cameras. That is, if its possible to bring the virtual headset up to the lab. Another option would be to simply stream the data over the network and you could have a very interesting long distance OBE. Go further to setup a TV in the robot lab with a feed coming from a camera back in your VRAC testing room. Perhaps a bit abstract, but would make for good publicity by involving the robot in your experiement while possibly easing development of a mechanized virtual head. * How close is the final project report to being publishable as a conference or journal paper (consider the research papers that were part of the course reading)? What would it take to get there? Closer than many other projects, but still maybe a tenth of the way there. To be publishable, a review of the research questions would be in order followed by repetitions in greater numbers of each experiment. The basic methodology is present and care was put into the experiemental setup, but everything needs to be more tightly controlled and standardized. For instance, the methodology behind the cellphone song being played while walking around the microphones is sketchy at best. Experiment with a variety of sounds moved in different ways and at different speeds to find the optimal OBE creator. This second experiment is the bread-and-butter of your research, it is a novel approach that seems promising. Thus the analysis done in the paper was adequate for the time constraints, but is woeful when considering being published. Please show with confidence percentages that participants experienced an OBE, where they experienced it, and the effects of various parameters such a allowing head tilt, different songs or movementment patterns on the strength of the OBEs. On the hardware front, things were done very professionally with the VR headset and noise-cancelling setup; however, I can't help but wish for at least a panning virtual head, one with a vertical degree of freedom would be even better. Then compare results with different numbers of degrees of freedoms and lag times to see how far the time warping peformed by the human brain can be pushed before it starts to ignore sensory input.