BeAnotherLab

BeAnotherLab
Information
Type	Non-profit cultural association
Industry	Virtual reality, art and science research
Headquarters	Espronceda Institute of Art and Culture, Barcelona, Spain
Notable Personnel	Philippe Bertrand, Christian Cherene, Daniel González Franco, Daanish Masood, Marte Roel, Arthur Tres
Products	The Machine to Be Another, The Library of Ourselves, The Autonomous Machine
Website	https://beanotherlab.org

BeAnotherLab is an interdisciplinary art and science collective based in Barcelona, Spain, that builds embodied virtual reality systems for exploring the relationship between identity and empathy. It is best known for The Machine to Be Another, a low-budget "body swap" installation in which a participant wears a head-mounted display showing live video from the point of view of a real person, a performer who mirrors the participant's movements. The group describes itself as a not-for-profit cultural association registered in Barcelona and licenses its work under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license.

The project began as a prototype in Barcelona in 2012. Its approach replaces the dummy or computer-generated bodies used in embodiment experiments with a live human performer, so that the participant feels real touch on the body they see. By 2018 the system had been shown in more than 25 countries in artistic, cultural and academic settings, according to a review article co-written by co-founder Philippe Bertrand. Guinness World Records lists The Machine to Be Another as the first virtual reality body swap simulation, dated 2013 in Spain.

Reviewed 7 October 2026. Checked every claim against the TEI 2014 paper, the 2018 Frontiers review, Guinness World Records, Dezeen, Ars Electronica, Makery, Nesta and BeAnotherLab's own pages; self-reported awards attributed. About review dates.

History

Origins (2012-2014)

BeAnotherLab started prototyping The Machine to Be Another in Barcelona in 2012. The four authors of the group's 2014 conference paper, Philippe Bertrand, Daniel González Franco, Arthur Pointeau and Christian Cherene, listed both BeAnotherLab and departments of Universitat Pompeu Fabra as their affiliations. That work-in-progress paper, presented at the TEI 2014 conference in Munich (16-19 February 2014), reported results from a four-month art residency at l'Estruch in Sabadell, Spain (March to June 2013) and from the Madrid-MIT M+Vision Hacking Medicine event in July 2013. The group's own project history also records a 2013 talk on the work at the Hangar art centre in Barcelona and a 2013 residency at Fab Lab Barcelona, where the hardware design was documented with the architect and digital fabrication expert Anastasia Pistofidou.

The paper drew on body ownership experiments by Henrik Ehrsson's group at the Karolinska Institute, and on studies suggesting that inducing ownership of a different body can reduce implicit racial bias. During the residency, artists and members of the public were invited to act as performers and to propose issues to address. Early performances included an immigrant from Senegal living in Spain who told stories about his life as users handled objects in the room; "In Merce's wheels", in which users saw themselves in the body of a woman in a wheelchair; a mother-daughter piece; and "Dancing on the Feet", in which a dancer who uses a wheelchair saw herself from the viewpoint of a standing dancer who followed her gestural instructions. At Hacking Medicine the team worked with neurologists, engineers and designers on two pitches: an embodiment game for the diagnosis and treatment of eating disorders, and a mirror-illusion device for neurorehabilitation built with Oculus Rift headsets and head-tracked cameras.

In January 2014 the design magazine Dezeen covered the "Gender Swap" experiment, which asked what it would be like "to see through the eyes of the opposite sex". Users wore Oculus goggles showing real-time video from a camera on a headset worn by a performer, and the two agreed on a set of movements and acted them out at the same time in identical spaces. Dezeen described BeAnotherLab as an interdisciplinary art collective and reported that the low-budget setup used webcams, mobile phones with built-in digital compasses for tracking and Arduino microcontrollers, and was to be made available online as open source. The Machine to Be Another was one of the Interactive Art works in the CyberArts 2014 exhibition of the Prix Ars Electronica at the OK Center for Contemporary Art in Linz (4-8 September 2014).

Expansion (2015-2019)

In April 2015 Makery reported that the project was in residence at Fab Lab Barcelona, received support from MIT, and was developed as open source under a non-commercial Creative Commons Share-Alike license. The article described participants seated in armchairs on either side of a hanging curtain, wearing Oculus Rift headsets and seeing through each other's perspective.

In 2015 BeAnotherLab held a workshop at the Holot detention center for asylum seekers in Israel. Over about five years the group presented narratives from performers including asylum seekers in Israel, an Iraq veteran in the United States, an African migrant in Spain and victims of police brutality in Brazil. The same year it started The Library of Ourselves, a related project that records first-person 360-degree films for an archive of personal stories.

On 27 October 2016 The Machine to Be Another, entered from Spain, was named a winner of the 2016 European Social Innovation Competition, themed "Integrated Futures", with a prize of 50,000 euros. Nesta described the entry as a project to let people "see themselves in the body and experience of a refugee", with pre-recorded audio narratives shared through 360-degree video at stations in schools, libraries, museums and other cultural institutions.

Autonomous installations and current work (2020-2026)

On 2 October 2020 BeAnotherLab opened The Autonomous Machine at the Technorama Swiss Science Center in Winterthur as part of the museum's permanent "Mindscapes" exhibition. This version runs without the two assistants who normally guide the experience; the performative element is carried out by the machine itself, with built-in mirrors and objects, so that it can be installed long term in museums. The group lists an upgrade of that installation in September 2025.

BeAnotherLab remained active in 2026. Its event listing includes a Body Swap installation at the Scène Nationale de l'Essonne in Évry (March 2026), the 2026 APS Annual Convention (May 2026) and the Summer School on eXtended Reality Technology and eXperience (July 2026). At the ACM CHI 2026 conference in Barcelona in April 2026 the group contributed to a workshop on Body Transformation Experiences, arguing that facilitation and care are an essential part of how embodiment is made possible rather than an external layer added to a technical system. Its post thanked Elena Márquez Segura and Ana Tajadura-Jimenez for involving the group, and Mel Slater, Kia Höök, Pedro Lopes and Kristi Kuuk for their input.

How The Machine to Be Another works

The system couples the movements of a user to those of a performer through head-mounted displays, head tracking, headphones, a microphone and servo-controlled cameras. The performer holds a camera that captures their point of view, and servos turn the camera to follow head orientation data from a sensor on the user's head. The performer tries to copy the user's movements as closely as possible, usually in a different but seemingly identical place, and tells personal stories triggered when the user handles particular objects. Because the "avatar" is a real person, the user receives real touch instead of vibration motors and can see detailed gestures such as finger movements that traditional computer vision tracking could not easily reproduce. The paper notes that the performer copies movements with some delay while the head tracking drives the camera in real time, and that users tend to accept the lag and move slowly.

The 2018 review describes the Body Swap mode, in which two users exchange perspectives through VR headsets and first-person cameras while being asked to move slowly and synchronize their movements, as the artists provide touch. After about ten minutes of exploring their hands, arms, legs, objects and mirrors, the pair are placed face to face, and performer and user can meet in person right after the experience. It lists the design's limitations compared with laboratory embodiment studies: a monoscopic camera, a constrained field of view and lower resolution, the hardware having initially been the Oculus Rift DK2. The authors also note that controlled studies of whether these protocols build empathy had yet to be carried out.

BeAnotherLab presents the system in several variants:

Variant	Description
The Machine Classic	The original one-person setup: a user sees the first-person view of a performer who mimics their movements, with two assistants guiding the session and handing over objects
Gender Swap / Body Swap	Two participants swap perspectives with each other and move in synchrony
Embodied Narratives	A storyteller "swaps bodies" with a user, who hears the storyteller's pre-recorded narration of a personal experience
The Autonomous Machine	A body swap for two people that runs without facilitators, intended for permanent museum installation; premiered at Technorama in 2020

Other projects

The Library of Ourselves (2015 onward) applies the technology of The Machine to Be Another to documentary filmmaking. It records 360-degree films from a first-person perspective and shows them at "Social VR Stations" hosted by cultural, social and research institutions. BeAnotherLab says the archive holds several dozen films produced in the Netherlands, Spain, Colombia, Brazil, Jordan and elsewhere, including SOS Racismo (Spain, 2015), Jonah (Netherlands), Um Menino Chamado Maycon (Brazil, 2016) and Narratives of Displacement (Jordan, 2019). Each film runs about five to eight minutes. The group's award list includes an honorary mention for The Library of Ourselves in the 2017 Arts, Science and Technology "Start Prize" in Linz.

Research

BeAnotherLab members have published on embodiment and empathy, often with university partners. Bertrand's 2018 review in Frontiers in Robotics and AI, written with researchers from Université Paris Descartes and the University of York, surveys strategies for training empathy-related abilities with body ownership illusions in VR and uses The Machine to Be Another as an artistic case study. Its affiliations list "BeAnotherLab Research, BeAnotherLab Association, Barcelona", and its conflict-of-interest statement identifies Bertrand as co-creator of the work and co-founder of the association. The group's research page also lists a 2016 paper on virtual body swap in health and education and two 2018 contributions to Constructivist Foundations by Marte Roel Lesur and colleagues on bodily illusions, one of them on head movements in bodily illusions. The work relates to research on the sense of embodiment, telepresence and the use of VR to evoke empathy.

Awards

The following recognitions are listed by BeAnotherLab; independent confirmation is cited where available.

Year	Award or recognition	Notes
2013	Hacking Medicine, MIT M+Vision Consortium	Best demo presented in the hackathon
2014	Prix Ars Electronica, Interactive Art	Honorary mention; shown in CyberArts 2014, Linz
2014	Laval Virtual Awards	Finalist; Learning Sciences and Humanities award
2015	N.I.C.E. Awards (Network for Innovation in Culture and Creativity in Europe)	First prize, Essen
2016	European Social Innovation Competition, "Integrated Futures"	Winner, 50,000 euros
2016	European Youth Awards	"Know Award" winner
2017	Global Pluralism Award, Global Centre for Pluralism	Honorary mention, Ottawa
2017	Arts, Science, Technology "Start Prize"	Honorary mention to The Library of Ourselves, Linz

See also

• Sense of embodiment
• Telepresence
• Empathy
• Proteus effect