Difference between revisions of "Session 5 - Applications of VR II: Towards a Phenomenology of the Body in Virtual Reality by Craig D. Murray"

Latest revision as of 18:24, 16 December 2017

Recap on Merleau-Ponty

Take home message from the preface and introduction to the Phenomenology of the Body is that objective thought comes from letting go of the object of perceptual experience. An account of human experience must

Machine to Be Another Lab

The Machine to be Another Lab [1] is a international collective of researchers investigating embodiment and represented through experiments with HMD VR technology. The "Gender Swap" study examines the nature of the embodied self, where participants taken on the perspective of the other and explore the feeing of being in the other's body by practicing synchronized movements in order to obtain a sense of body ownership and identification. Watch the video [2] or see Serious games in neuroscientific experiments for further details.

Applications of VR

General question: How can we construct interdisciplinary questions concerning VR? First, let's look at some of the state of the art applications of VR.

→ Gaming - Surely the most popular use of VR is as a means to experience a more vivid and sensational video game experience. This goes for games with pure entertainment purposes, but also Serious games. A quick browse on Youtube will reveal the rapidly increasing VR video games industry.

→ Military - Dismounted soldier training, a 157 million dollar program released last summer, is essentially a hi-tech Call of Duty experience, helping soldiers to react appropriately to specific and realistic combat situations. See Serious games in military or the video here [3]. PTSD treatment: see this Motherboard documentary on VR technologies used to help treat PTSD [4] and Serious games in therapy.

→ Clinical Practice - Clinicians in the University of San Diego are using VR to practice exposure therapy with patients with phobias. → Gaming

@@ Line 3: / Line 3: @@
 == Machine to Be Another Lab ==
-The Machine to be Another Lab [http://www.themachinetobeanother.org/] is a international collective of researchers investigating embodiment and represented through experiments with HMD VR technology. The "Gender Swap" study examines the nature of the embodied self, where participants taken on the perspective of the other and explore the feeing of being in the other's body by practicing synchronized movements in order to obtain a sense of body ownership and identification. See here:
+The Machine to be Another Lab [http://www.themachinetobeanother.org/] is a international collective of researchers investigating embodiment and represented through experiments with HMD VR technology. The "Gender Swap" study examines the nature of the embodied self, where participants taken on the perspective of the other and explore the feeing of being in the other's body by practicing synchronized movements in order to obtain a sense of body ownership and identification. Watch the video [https://vimeo.com/84150219|here] or see [[serious_games_in_experiments#Multisensory_integration|Serious games in neuroscientific experiments]] for further details.
-[https://vimeo.com/84150219]
 === Applications of VR ===
@@ Line 10: / Line 9: @@
 First, let's look at some of the state of the art applications of VR.
-→ Gaming - Surely the most popular use of VR is as a means to experience a more vivid and sensational video game experience. A quick browse on Youtube will reveal the rapidly increasing VR video games industry.
-→ Military - Dismounted solider training, a 157 million dollar program released last summer, is essentially a hi-tech Call of Duty experience, helping soldiers to react appropriately to specific and realistic combat situations. See here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NND7Hk5fYdI].  PTSD treatment: see this Motherboard documentary on VR technologies used to help treat PTSD [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIj26r4VPaA]
-→ Clinical Practice - Clinicians in the University of San Diego are using VR to practice exposure therapy with patients with phobias.
+→ Gaming - Surely the most popular use of VR is as a means to experience a more vivid and sensational video game experience. This goes for games with pure entertainment purposes, but also [[Serious games]]. A quick browse on Youtube will reveal the rapidly increasing VR video games industry.
-→ Gaming
+→ [[serious_games_in_military|Military]] - Dismounted soldier training, a 157 million dollar program released last summer, is essentially a hi-tech Call of Duty experience, helping soldiers to react appropriately to specific and realistic combat situations. See [[serious_games_in_military|Serious games in military]] or the video here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NND7Hk5fYdI].  PTSD treatment: see this Motherboard documentary on VR technologies used to help treat PTSD [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIj26r4VPaA] and [[serious_games_in_therapy|Serious games in therapy]].
-== Experiments with the help of VR ==
+→ Clinical Practice - Clinicians in the University of San Diego are using VR to practice [[serious_games_in_therapy#Phobia_treatment|exposure therapy]] with patients with phobias.
-The [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersion_(virtual_reality) Immersion] created by virtual reality devices allows us also to emulate the real world. By that, it is possible to bring a subset of the real world to the lab. Therefore we can gain more generalizable data and know about all the circumstances in the environment.
+→ Gaming
-=== Example ===
-[[File:Chrome 2017-05-16 15-34-55.png|thumb|Room 101]]
-An example for such an experiment is ''Room 101'' of the [http://www.cademccall.com/the-vr-wunderkammer/ The VR Wunderkammer project] by Cade McCall. Here, the subject has to collect glasses with fluids in a room. It starts off with an empty room and a single glass and with every new stage there's added different cirumstances to the room. Such as lava around a small path, boxes or even a moving spider. The picture to the right shows a subject trying to pick a glass from a moving spider's head. The whole session can be watched [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gqDUdLodWE&feature=youtu.be here].
-This experiment is meant to measure people's anxieties and is therefore also exaggerating with certain parameters (oversized spider, lava), which people usually don't know from the real world.
-=== Limitations ===
-VR takes a huge advantage of being able to move the head in any direction. But exactly that is taken away when it's used in an MRI, since the head has to be hold steady in there. Another problem with the head movement is that a VR-user can't really tilt his head to - let's say - look around a corner, since the gaze is calculated to one steady point at the moment.
-Also, a simulated realism (as in ''Room 101'') doesn't feel completly real obviously. One reason should be the not-so-advanced graphics yet. To solve that problem, one could try it with photo-realism, but in that case the VR-user mostly can't move all around the virtual environment and has to follow a certain path. The reason here is, that one would need a 360°-3D-view from each point in the real environment. Obviously it is much easier to stick to a simulated or perceived realism then. One of the biggest refutations is here the non-reproducible human facial expressions though. Additionally to that, it is extremely hard to display the user's bodily self.
-== Summary ==
-* VR has become easily (and inexpensive) available
-* Promises to increase external/ecological validity of research findings
-* Still has shortcomings:
-** Challenging analysis
-** Bodily self
-** Interaction in VR