Sharing a sense of balance with people

A curious way to feel copresence is described in Networked Equilibrium Sharing System "Balance Seat" by Nobuya Suzuki, Takahiro Kobayashi and Hiroshi Yasuda.

This paper presents a networked system connecting real space, which is shared and operated by three people. We made three pneumatic triple-axis motion platforms as a system to share a "sense of balance" with other people, and examined control methods for this system. Cylinders, which go up and down due to air pressure are used as actuators, and by moving the cylinders up and down while performing position control, the system can make the platform tilt

We considered whether it was possible to represent bodily sensations as symbols when shifting shared work performed in virtual space to real space. For our sensual symbol we chose the sense of balance, being a sense that is common to everyone. We constructed a system enabling users to share the sense of “balance”.

The authors chose to build this system to enable three people to communicate with each other.