iSpace Lab

Virtual real­ity soft­ware and hard­ware is becom­ing increas­ingly afford­able and pow­er­ful, and is increas­ingly being used in exper­i­men­tal research. In fact, the pos­si­bil­ity to con­duct tightly con­trolled and repeat­able exper­i­ments with nat­u­ral­is­tic multi-modal stim­uli in a closed action-perception loop sug­gest that VR could become an increas­ingly pow­er­ful yet flex­i­ble research tool. Despite increas­ing com­pu­ta­tional power and ren­der­ing qual­ity, though, it is debat­able whether humans nec­es­sar­ily per­ceive, feel, think, and behave sim­i­larly in real and vir­tual envi­ron­ments – which is essen­tial for achiev­ing suf­fi­cient real-world trans­fer of exper­i­men­tal results gained in the lab, and pro­vid­ing com­pelling expe­ri­ences. What might be miss­ing? What can we learn from this? How can we use this basic infor­ma­tion to improve both tech­nol­ogy and user experience? How might we be able to “cheat intel­li­gently” in VR and, e.g., pro­vide users with a com­pelling sen­sa­tion of being in (“pres­ence”) and moving through (“vec­tion”) the sim­u­lated envi­ron­ments with­out the need for full phys­i­cal loco­mo­tion or large costly motion sim­u­la­tors? Why is it so hard to con­trol all 4 degrees of free­dom when flying a quad­copter drone or through VR with the stan­dard gamepad or RC con­troller? And how could we use our knowl­edge about human embod­ied per­cep­tion to design more effec­tive yet afford­able loco­mo­tion inter­faces for both 2D (ground-based) and 3D (flying), for both telep­res­ence and immer­sive VR?