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There's an interesting demonstration video of galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) in action in the Forbes article "Remote-Controlled Humans" It's taken from a demonstration of the remote control GVS technology developed by NTT Communication Science Laboratories. They recently presented their work at SIGGRAPH 2005 under the title of "Shaking the World"
If it turns out that GVS is safe for prolonged use then it seems very likely that it will become incorporated into gaming platforms as an inexpensive way of amplifying the sense of movement. "The device provides a virtual sense of acceleration without an expensive mechanical platform synchronized to the flow of movies. " Link
GVS has a relatively long history and was first noted by Johann Purkyne in 1820 though it wasn't until 1875 that Josef Breuer demonstrated conclusively the vestibular origin of the perceptual disruption. There's a recent (2004) and interesting full text article available from the Journal of applied Physiology titled "Probing the human vestibular system with galvanic stimulation" which provides a good discussion of the history of the technique and some of its contemporary uses. (Richard C. Fitzpatrick and Brian L. Day : The Journal of Physiology (1999), 517.3, p. 631 Link)
If your interest takes you deeper then there's an interesting fMRI study that investigates regions of activation and deactivation in the brain at:
"Functional MRI of Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation" (Elie Lobel, Justus F. Kleine, Denis Le Bihan, Anne Leroy-Willig, and Alain Berthoz : The Journal of Neurophysiology Vol. 80 No. 5 November 1998, pp. 2699-2709 Link)
Thanks to Greg at Genius Now whose post drew my attention to this. Sinister applications of this seem pretty unlikely, though I'll happily agree that "...it would be useful for crowd control to have people walk in the same direction and sway to avoid collisions." Link, is a spooky idea whatever way you look at it.
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Very sad news. Robin Cook has died aged 59. That's a tragic loss for British politics. He was one of the politicians here that I most respected. He worked long and hard to try and create a more ethical form of foreign policy. He didn't always succeed but he was a voice of reason in complicated times and his integrity was something to be admired. Robin will be greatly missed.
