Demonstrating Preemptive Reaction

In this demonstration we enable preemptive force-feedback systems to speed up human reaction time without fully compromising the user’s sense of agency. Typically these haptic systems speed up human reaction time by means of electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) or mechanical actuation (exoskeletons), which unfortunately, completely remove the users sense of agency. We address this by actuating the user’s body, using EMS, within a particular time window (160 ms after visual stimulus), which we found to speed up reaction time by 80 ms, while retaining a sense of agency. Here, we demonstrate this at the example of two applications: (1) taking a picture of a high-speed moving object in mid-flight, or (2) hit baseball with a toy gun. With our preemption system, users are able to experience the right timing to shoot a photo, while still feeling a sense of agency.