Virtual reality is the successful replacement of the real world as a provider of multisensory information reaching our nervous system. Once immersed in a virtual environment, our brain responds to this fake reality as if it were real. However in this fake, virtual world, things may happen that change the rules from all previous experience that the brain has accumulated. In our laboratory we use virtual environments as a tool to understand how the brain creates an internal representation of the world and of ourselves.
In our studies we combine the immersion in virtual environments with different behavioural and physiological measures, including ECG, EEG and brain-computer interfaces.
We are particularly interested in the internal representation of the body and in how the input from different sensory streams sculpts such representation. We are also interested in the use of virtual environments in medical and therapeutical applications.
These investigations are carried out in the larger frame of the
Event Lab (Experimental Virtual Environments in Neuroscience and Technology).
We are currently involved in two EU projects to carry out this research:
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BEAMING
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VERE
Click on the images below to see figures from our recent studies. You can see more of our research interests in the publications section, Virtual Environments.