A simple demo in VR of the inverting lenses tutorial exercise by the sociologist Harold Garfinkel. A user wearing a virtual reality headset can vertically invert their visual perception of the physical world around them (via the camera pass-through) or invert their perception of a virtual world in which the user can pick up virtual objects and use virtual tools. Very disorientating. Some people may get very sick 🤮 very quickly!
An HTC Vive Pro VR headset and controllers installed with SteamVR on a VR-ready laptop with Windows 10.
- Download the release build and run the
breachingVR.exefile. - Use the keyboard to control the UI
- Switch between virtual scene and physical camera with the RETURN key on the keyboard.
- Flip or revert the image with the SPACE key.
- Use the left and right ARROW keys to adjust for the camera pass-through images not being aligned.
- This demo works with the HTC Vive Pro VR headset. It may work with other headsets compatible with SteamVR, but the real world demo is dependent on the external camera feed from the HMD.
- If you have any bug reports or fixes then add an issue and/or pull request.
Inverting lenses have been used by psychologists and phenomenologists since the late nineteenth century (Linden et al 1999; Merleau-Ponty 1945/2012; Stratton 1896, 1897).
A technical description of Garfinkel's inverting lenses tutorial exercise is given below:
Inverting lenses made available as revealed details of witnessable and inspectable demonstrations the phenomenal fields of ordinary human jobs. With them we came upon the properties of lived, phenomenal details of instructions and instructed actions, and that these details are chained to the hopeless embodiment of the parties to that setting.
The lenses made it possible to examine these jobs in and as chiasmically, stable, unremarkably achieved, cogent and coherent details of practical action.
The lenses were embedded in garbage pails that were then worn upside down as masks. The lenses were also mounted and worn in welder's masks, as shown in the photographs.
The pail sits on the shoulders; the prisms are positioned at gaze level. In that position the scene is inverted. While wearing the masks the students are trying to get done ordinary, even trivial, tasks. For example, I sent a crowd into the women's room and the men's room where there are sinks. Each student has a styrofoam cup. Each is to get the cup filled. They are to see, for themselves, tracking their own "doings," and with or without the mask, watching each other "being busied" with getting the cup filled.
In the photo Maryann has the mask on. She and Jerry are in a backyard; the low wall is alongside them. Jerry has said to her, "Maryann sit over there." He does this gesture (points), "Maryann sit over there." Maryann, with the lenses on, reports, "I can see Jerry, but I don't know where he is."
In the photo she is alongside the wall; after Jerry says this she turns to the wall, and she is doing this (pats wall): she asks as she pats the wall, "Here?," he says, "No." She pats, "Here?" "No." She is not looking at him. She pats, "Here?" "Yes." She is trying to find by patting the wall what she cannot find when she goes looking to find Jerry and to see Jerry pointing to the place where she should sit. So, here we have a first thing that comes up about what it is to be finding the intelligibility, and by looking for and looking at something listened to and heard, to find the followability of an instruction as the most ordinary thing in. the world.
So, you come to the party, the hostess greets you, "Please sit down," and there's the welcoming gesture. What Maryann cannot see is what Jerry is doing with his eyes that makes up seeably when she looks for it the fact that his eyes in an examinable gazing have a destination. Also, she cannot see when he points that the pointing is a gesture such that she is trying to pick it out of an assemblage of phenomenal details that can be examined to find the direction of the point, and that the direction itself has a followable and findable destination. She cannot see from where she is standing that a wall alongside her finds Jerry positioned in a place at the end of it and there he is seeably facing her relative to the wall that runs alongside her to her right, alongside him to his left. With the lenses use we come upon here, this collection of what? We'll gloss them as directional and orientational properties--0f path, wall, furniture, bodies, heads, faces, arms, "sounded doings," hands fingers, gaze-glossed and thereby not seen or seeable again as the "garden setting." These are not Euclidian properties. They are details of a phenomenal field. To get at them, you have to have persons embodiedly there and embodiedly engaged in ordinary jobs. Those properties have escaped the insistence of formal analysis: "After all, what are the invariant structures of those properties? We want not to be swamped by a collection that makes up the circumstantiality of ordinary activities."
But the inverting lenses promise that indeed there is an invariant. There is a structure in those phenomenal details. There are constancies. But they are not to be found by introducing generic representations into the in vivo stream of practices. Instead, they are endogenously provided for by the local parties who staff the achieved phenomenon. And because they are so provided for, they are somehow, by us, to be found, endogenously.
Is that our speculation? We'll call it that for the moment. The speculation is overcome when we ask, "What do the lenses do?" "What are the lenses good for?"
The lenses undermine, they destroy, they make utterly unavailable the achieved cogency and the achieved coherence of phenomenal details. Here's the way to see that. When you put the lenses to your eyes the scene looks like, "Okay, so what? It's the same familiar room except that its upside down." But, when you try to do something with the scene that looks so familiar you find that you are inept. You find that the scene, the jobs that the familiar scene "solicits" are intractable. It's not that you can't somehow treat your upside-down littered desk as a territorial problem to be solved. But, in getting that done you will be engaged in coding familiar but only upside-down litter so as to respecify it in the interests of whatever say of finding a place to sit before the litter and doing so in such a fashion that for you and for Anyone the litter's availability to the right hand's privileged access to the pile that contains but does not hide the letter that the hand goes to is burdened by its unavoidable and now only inspectable "technique-al" course.
So, a first collection of things we learn with them is the massive relevance of the achieved coherence of phenomenal details of embodied jobs. These are practical activities. Think of these as jobs of bodies-not anatomists' bodies, or biologists' bodies, but work's bodies. The bodies of practices. These bodies have eyes that are skills; eyes that are skills in the ways that eyes do looking's work. Where seeing is something more, other and different than formal analytically describable positioning the orbs to assure certain retinal registration of a perceptual field, let alone a visual field.
With the lenses we learn about achieved coherences of a phenomenal field, of the details of positions and placement-the positioning work of body parts like fingers, eyes, feet, heads, lips, chins. The lenses are resources that by undermining the transparently achieved coherent detail of indispensable jobs give us what we need of our enterprise which is to become strange again with the ways of practical action as worldly stuff.
from Garfinkel (2002: 207-210).
Garfinkel, Harold (2002). Ethnomethodology's Program: Working Out Durkheim's Aphorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Linden, David E. J., Kallenbach, Ulrich, Heinecke, Armin & Wolf Singer, Rainer Goebel (1999). The Myth of Upright Vision. A Psychophysical and Functional Imaging Study of Adaptation to Inverting Spectacles. Perception 28: 469-481.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1945/2012). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge Kegan & Paul.
Stratton, George M. (1896). Some Preliminary Experiments on Vision Without Inversion of the Retinal Image. Psychological Review 3(6): 611-617.
Stratton, George M. (1897). Vision Without Inversion of the Retinal Image. Psychological Review 4: 463-481.