This isn't real?
What is real?
How do you define real?
 If your talking about what you can feel, what you can smell,
what you can taste and see...
 then "real" is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.
I have the feeling to be in that environment right now
and not where I'm standing at the moment.
What is it in my brain right now that asserts that I am really here,
looking at you, talking to you.
What is it that generates this?
This has been a concern for the field of computer engineering for a long time.
How can we mediate this sensation?
The RealiSM project at EPFL is enabling research in cognitive neuroscience of the self
by bringing virtual reality technologies in the loop
for creating new designs and experimentation possibilities,
to investigate how the human brain is dealing with being in a place
and experiencing being there and now.
So for example we can study peri-personal space,
which is a brain mechanism known to define the space and the boundary
between the area around your body and what is the rest of the world.
To experiment that, RealiSM provides the technology
 which allows us to test multisensory integration conflicts
with virtual reality and virtual objects approaching the person
and observe people's reactions.
The peri-personal space is a region of space
between the external world and my bodily space, it's this intermediate space.
Should a ball be approaching, or should something else be approaching
my avatar's body, my brain, here and now in my body,
will react in different ways depending on what level of presence we have achieved.
Have you ever had a dream Neo that you were so sure was real.
What if you were unable to wake from that dream?
How would you know the difference between the dream world,
 and the real world?
We have the tendency to consider that the world is only visual.
We don't know that it's completely multisensory.
That's where neuroscience of the self is telling us the body is "here",
if I don't see my body, I am not "here".
I am the eyes of someone else, I'm in a movie, I'm somewhere,
but mentally floating in the air. Not physically there.
Thanks to this tiny camera,
when they are looking at their body,
they actually see their body inside and integrated into the scene.
So why is it important to also immerse the body,
the avatar, the virtual body into the scene?
And I think that first of all, it really boosts the effect that we observe.
It makes the degree of presence, the degree of realism a lot higher.
To give this complete feeling, we have to have
 tactile, proprioception, motion.
All that included in the visual and auditory experience.
This is another difference, that our system, the RealiSM system has to other groups:
the focus we have on the body, because the role of the body,
for achieving presence and high states of immersion
has been shown by research findings.
I really think that planning and innovation are not compatible.
Because if you plan innovation, you've already created a boundary on rationality.
You can use virtual reality to expose people to their fear stimulus.
It has been shown that virtual reality is very effective for that.
The problem is how do you get a customised therapeutic environment
 for any possible social phobia, arachnophobia or..
taking the example of fear of heights...
...how do you create a simple environment which would allow people to
face being on top of a cliff,
and experiencing the fear of it, but accompanied by a therapist, progressively overcoming it.
So you are not only looking at an extreme height,
but you also feel to be present, there, realistically.
And now, of course, the subject can relearn that height
 in those particular instances is not dangerous.
This may help and translate into real-life scenarios when our height-phobia patients
encounter a distant or large height in their life.
Neuroplasticity, in simple terms, is the ability to rewire your brain.
We are not hard-wired, and experiences can change this wiring.
And by understanding the cognition of being there, and now in virtual reality,
we will enable creating what it is - the technology of virtual reality.
This technology is experimental now.
We have it in the lab at EPFL and our lab at W Science.
We believe that within a couple of years
 it will be available for everybody to use.
I record a template, I take the movie production out of it,
 I edit it quickly, and I can experience it quickly.
I can share the experience I've been recording.
Imagine you are standing on a bridge in Zurich,
you can capture that moment.
You can send it to your library,
and when you go home you can relive that moment exactly,
the sights and sounds that you have captured in 360.
You can look up and see the sky, you can see below you, you see everything.
And when you look around, you see your own body.
The difference between what we're doing and the movie Matrix,
is that we are not creating a new reality, or a virtual reality.
And that is the significant difference.
The world is a beautiful place, and the last thing we want to live in
is in our mind only.
