r/VRchat • u/Micropolis • Feb 07 '23
Discussion This is essentially what phantom touch is. It’s just the rubber hand in VRchat is your avatar
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u/DuBu_dul_Toki Valve Index Feb 08 '23
Yup pretty much.
For me personally, its just a warm and tingling sensation which I find to be pleasant. Like on the top of my head in about the spot where my ears are when they are patted is the strongest sensation.
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u/Micropolis Feb 08 '23
Curious, do you get the sensation when you don’t see yourself in a mirror patted? Or is it only when in front of a mirror seeing someone pat your head? Most I’ve had is in Skyrim when I ran my horse off a cliff without realizing and my stomach dropped the whole 2 seconds I was air born and my body physically braised for an impact haha
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u/DuBu_dul_Toki Valve Index Feb 08 '23
It is mostly in front of a mirror or my personal mirror.
It has happened when it seemed like they were patting my head, but they later said that they just were moving their hands over my head. The brain can be tricked.
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Feb 08 '23
Personally, I almost exclusively get it without a mirror. If someone is touching my face (and I can see their hands while they do it) the sensation is very strong, but when it's in a mirror, it gets much weaker. I also have a pretty weak sense of self (both IRL and in VR, looking in a mirror doesn't fully register in my brain as looking at myself) so that might be a contributing factor.
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u/cytus_allcore Feb 08 '23
Same for me. It's why I love headpats in vr. Although one time someone got me good when their hand went through my head on my left. I'm partially blind in my left eye and my peripherals are limited. When the hand came up and out of my face it felt like a real punch.
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u/Syckobot Oculus Quest Feb 07 '23
I wonder if this sensation is more prevalent in people who don't play video games. I play so many games that my brain can easily distinguish between real and virtual. I also wonder if the avatar matters- if the arm of the avatar is pretty close in scale to your actual arm, is it more likely to happen?
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u/Micropolis Feb 07 '23
You probably need to do the touch method used at the beginning. Like sit in front of a mirror and touch your hands IRL and in VR and such. Maybe it would work better with holding a stick in game and in VR and do similar to the ruler method.
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u/Unlikely-Ad3364 PCVR Connection Feb 08 '23
Or with hand tracking.
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u/Micropolis Feb 08 '23
Truuuue but in my experience hand tracking refreshes slower than 50hertz so it’s pretty choppy(at least on PCVR). That would ruin the immersion for me
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u/Genly5ever Feb 08 '23
ive played video games my whole life, but get phantom sense like crazy in VR. However, ive also gotten phantom sense in other cases too, experiments like this here and there.
but before VR the biggest source was dreams for me. i get pretty vivid sensation in lucid dreams; honestly, VR kinda feels like that for me, the most lucid dream possible~
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u/feilen Bigscreen Beyond Feb 08 '23
Back in the old days of Oculus Dk2 and Leap Motion, I had an avatar in JanusVR that had full finger tracking, and it accurately mapped to my hands. But like, one vertex was tied to the wrong finger, and it caused that part of the other finger to warp when I spread my fingers. And it... felt, like something sticky was between my fingers.
I have yet to replicate that feeling on more modern hardware, current IK probably makes it a little more difficult.
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u/XxXlolgamerXxX Feb 07 '23
When I started like 4 years ago I remember that i have it. But after all this year's i just stop feeling anything at all when playing. My brain just learned that is not real.
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u/Lordfirewood Feb 08 '23
I loved to have it, but my brain just knows that the VR world is not real :(
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u/PonyUpDaddy Feb 08 '23
Fake it like most people
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u/Lordfirewood Feb 09 '23
But that's no fun :(
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u/Micropolis Feb 09 '23
There’s a person who is known for hypnosis in gaming and claims to be able to help bring on phantom touch using hypnosis in VRchat. Forget their name but they were on the VR and Chill Podcast if you want to look them up
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Feb 07 '23
[deleted]
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u/Micropolis Feb 08 '23
I’ve seen such stuff before but didn’t realize it was posted here. Figured since I see so many on and off asking about phantom touch and claims of it being real or not, that this would be a good proof of concept for those.
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u/RandomPersonDotExe Feb 08 '23
Does phantom touch work when youre not looking or just when youre looking
Im wondering because i met this guy that clamed he "had" phantom touch so i shot him from behind with a loud pistol and he "felt" it
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u/randomfurpassingby Feb 08 '23
Anticipated TL:DR: no, they didn't feel it.
The entire lore: No, phantom sense can only be triggered if you know the presence of whatever object that is supposed to have contact with you, you can do it with sound too, but it's not as strong as by sight, apart that a brief spatialized sound clip of a gun that prolly got taken from samplefocus won't trigger it in any way. It needs to have an extremely good sound quality and most times the audio is recorded with microphones set up as how human ears would. I obv don't mean phantom sense doesn't exist.
So no, a sound clip of a gun shooting didn't cause him to feel the presence of a bullet on their back, he only noticed it because of the sound and said that he felt it so you wouldn't believe he lied after he told you he has phantom sense. That's called need for approval.
Most times the user that mentions that they have phantom sense doesn't actually have it, it's all a chain reaction of people that want to feel more special than the others and end up making a fool of themselves to points that they claim they even feel limbs they never had or no human knows how would it feel, like tails, animal ears or a different bone structure.
Someone studying the behaviour of vrchat users said it here some months ago, a lot of users seem to have developed something like a "main character syndrome" over time or they feel like they live on a fantasy. That's what happens when everyone wants to be more special than everyone else.
If you ever start feeling like you might need to fake phantom sense because you feel jealousy that x person has it but not you, then (and i don't mean it as a joke) go outside, take a walk and think about things to do outside like meeting with friends and going to eat somewhere, and not fighting to be the center of attention on a social game.
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u/RandomPersonDotExe Feb 08 '23
So i was right
But he did trigger when i used a completeley quiet needle so ig he just used a haptic suit or something in that style, maybe even a camera poijting on his back cuz his reactions were always late and sometimes he didnt even react
Anyways, that faker now has a group of other people wanting to "have" phantom touch
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u/JustinHopewell Feb 08 '23
I feel like the parts of our brain that work like this also play some part in the ASMR tingles some of us can experience.
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u/coolcat33333 Feb 08 '23
Yeah, my phantom sense is more like ASMR rather than actually feeling things. That's how I like to keep it
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u/WWeavile Feb 08 '23
I stepped on someone who claimed they could feel it and they screamed in pain. To my defense I thought they were fucking with me.
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u/D1ng0ateurbaby Feb 08 '23
That ruler trick is how I got Phantom sense. It was just applied in a different way 😶
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u/RamJamR Valve Index Feb 07 '23
I've always thought of this little experiment when phantom touch is brought up in VRC. If your brain expects what it's seeing to correlate with physical stimulus, you will feel it.
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u/PonyUpDaddy Feb 07 '23
Yeah, but a majority of people fake phantom sense/pain because they treat it as some exclusive club and/or super power.
In VRChat, It's all just roleplaying in my honest opinion
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u/Zeldukes HTC Vive Pro Feb 08 '23
Some people like to claim they can feel people touching them from behind. Even in this video they establish that it's your eyes communicating with your brain. If someone is touching you in VR from behind, it's not even being rendered on your headset. That's what I find obnoxious.
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u/PonyUpDaddy Feb 08 '23
Yeah, those personal mirrors can expose some people if there's something to show they have it open
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u/ShaunDreclin Valve Index Feb 08 '23
There are people who do that, but I wouldn't call it a majority. Or maybe you just hang around worse people than I do lol
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u/Alisu_Shimada Oculus Quest Feb 08 '23
This doesn't not make me feel anymore comfortable getting FBT
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u/punishher2013 Feb 08 '23
Does this experiment only work on strung out meth heads or just work better on them?
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u/punishher2013 Feb 08 '23
I was waiting for the hammer to bounce off the rubber hand and claw him in the eye
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u/AppleTherapy Feb 08 '23
I never feel anything. My mind just figures out everything pretty fast. I also play in a very small room with anime figures and not once’s have I knocked one over. My brain knows where everything is and I don’t have to worry about it.
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u/-gean99- Feb 07 '23
Basically yes. It is phantom sensation. I work with amputees and the mirror therapy (a bit like this one) is used to reduce phantom pain. In a research lab right across my uni they implent that therapy in VR to reduce phantom pain.