Daily Archives: March 7, 2017

Anastasiya Sharkova talks about her VR experience at a SpiritualVR event.

What if we had a "Dream Marketing Machine" a way to easily and reliably churn out emotionally passionate customers for any brand? Like Apple's fanboys but much quicker and for a lot less money.

At a recent event hosted by SpiritualVR panelist on-boarding Sharkova said she was deeply moved by her first experience with virtual reality (VR) a title called theBlu:Encounter in which you go eye to eye with a blue whale.

She said the experience is so powerful and so overwhelming it bypassed all reason and logic. She knew it was all computer generated yet when she looked into eye of the blue whale she immediately felt a deep emphatic connection that lasted for days.

And she noticed a curious effect: she used a lot less water for the next two weeks.

This scares me. What if the Blue Whale represents a brand such as Big Blue -- IBM and I'm suddenly emotionally bonding with a commercial organization and I can't control it?

We know that VR can affect behavior because it is already used in therapeutic applications treating post traumatic stress disorders.

Its widespread use in marketing is inevitable and when combined with AI, biometric sensors and personalization -- it will become extraordinary in its effectiveness. A Dream Marketing Machine.

Dream or nightmare?

It's a dream for marketers because all they talk about is creating compelling and emotionally authentic media content. I recently spoke with Yuval Boger, CEO of open-source VR tech design company Sensics.

"We are still in early stages and the headsets and equipment needs to improve and cost less but we are seeing a lot of interest in marketing applications. There are some excellent opportunities to create powerful branded VR experiences."

- But would you willingly agree to a VR experience that you knew was designed to persuade you and manipulate your emotions for commercial gain? And then continue to influence your behavior long after the event?

- Would you allow the Disney whale to try to emotionally bond with your child?

- What if your new job required a swim with the company culture whale as part of HR's on-boarding?

- What if your government insists you swim with its patriotic whale?

Don't get hung up on these balaenopteran examples. The creature will be chosen and shaped just for you -- for maximum effect.

Total sphere of control...

Marketing is mostly confined to the periphery of our daily experience such as with online ads, billboards, etc.

VR gives creators control over the entire 360 degree sphere of the user experience -- every pixel every sound and every aspect of the narrative. Marketers have never ever had so much control.

Mass media critic Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s was alarmed by tiny TV screens.

- I wouldn't let my children into any marketing VR experience;

- I wouldn't use it;

- and I'd be mistrustful of hiring someone who had VR training at a competitor. Joseph Stalin got his US atomic bomb secrets because of spies motivated by an emotional connection to the Soviet Union and not because of money.

VR for social uses?

How about using VR for positive purposes? Using less water, getting fitter, eating better because of crafted VR experiences that work to change our behavior?

What if socially responsible VR experiences are sponsored by brands? Would that be OK? Would we trust them?

Question the future...

Society gains nothing by allowing its people to be ensnared by emotional bonds to abstract entities.

If our technologies of persuasion become too good at what they do -- and they will eventually reach that point -- then they become too good to use.

The question is: Who has the right to access our emotions? The government? Hollywood? Or anyone at anytime and in any way?

As our technologies of persuasion become more advanced the answer has to be: No one.

Until we understand that answer -- and make it work -- the world of marketing will rush into VR faster than Elon Musk in a Hyperloop pod.

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Technologies of persuasion: Virtual Reality and the Dream Marketing Machine - ZDNet

CNN is making a grand entrance into the immersive medium of VR with a new effort called CNNVR. Trumps favorite news source is launching the VR unitto transport users to the front row of global events.

The company is launching the VR unit with a feature highlighting the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. CNN has already worked on nearly 50 pieces of 360-degree content, so the mainnews is that there is now a more centralized home for viewing the content and a more formalized internal structure for producing it.

The big change for users is that 360-degree videos will now be natively viewable in CNNs iOS and Android app, making the app the third largest VR-capable mobile app according to the company, behind YouTube and Facebook. In addition to being viewable on smartphones, the media companys videos will also be accessible on select VR headsets, including the Samsung Gear VR, Google Daydream and Oculus Rift. Desktop users will also be able to check out the content on their 360-compatible browser.

The company plans to highlight live-streamed VR content as well as produced regular VR programming.

Many have heralded VR as a particularly apt medium for capturing perspectives and fostering empathy for emotional situations unfolding across the globe. It certainly doesnt work for everything, but few mediums can capture the hell of war or the chaos of riots as well as 360 footage can.

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CNN launches dedicated virtual reality journalism unit | TechCrunch - TechCrunch

Forbes

The Future Of Virtual Reality Isn't Your Living Room - It's The Mall Forbes A wave of public space virtual reality (otherwise known as location-based entertainment or LBE) is breaking, allowing everyone to experience new high-end home VR systems whose requirements puts them out of the reach of most consumers. Unique ...

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The Future Of Virtual Reality Isn't Your Living Room - It's The Mall - Forbes

SXSW attendees next week will be able to climb into a cockpit for a virtual flyby of major Tokyo landmarks in whats being billed as the worlds first virtual-reality motion ride with ultra-high-resolution 8K video.

Unlike other virtual-reality implementations, the 8K VR motion ride at the Austin Convention Center will notrequire a head-mounted display or headphones instead, it uses a hemispherical screen and surround sound to provide the VR experience.

The two-seat ride is produced by a group of Japanese media and entertainment companies, led by NHK Enterprises and NHK Media Technology, which are affiliates of Japans public broadcaster, NHK. They worked with spherical-screen technology vendor Wonder Vision Techno Laboratory and RecoChoku Labo (the R&D department of digital-music provider RecoChoku) to develop the five-minute ride, which is described as a celebration of Tokyo as the host city for the 2020 Summer Olympic Games.

Whats the point?Aside from promoting Tokyo tourism, NHK is interested in showing whats possible with 8K technology, which the broadcaster has been a leader in developing. With a resolution of7680 by 4320 pixels or four times as many as Ultra HD 4K 8K promises visual displays that make it impossible for the human eye to detect individual pixels, delivering unprecedented realism.

The technology powering the 8K VR ride could be the predecessor of next-generationtheater experiences. However,there currently are no commercial plans for it,according to Tetsuya Fukuhara, executive producer, business development strategy for NHK Enterprises (NEP).

We wanted to enhance the technology by creating a new immersive VR experience for the SXSW audience that showcases our technological advancements and the beauty of Tokyo,Fukuhara explained.

At SXSW 2016, NEP and NHK Media Technology debuted their first 8K VR theater experience. For the ride at this years confab, the companies used Wonder Visions Sphere 5.2 visual system which is 5.2 meters wide, 3.4 meters high and 2.6 meters deep and added an 8K-compatible projector along with asix-axis motion base.

The ride features on-the-ground and aerial views of such sites such as Tokyo Tower (pictured below), Shibuya Crossing and Sens ji Temple. The rides soundtrack is Tokyo Victory, a hit song by Japans Southern All Stars that lead singer Keisuke Kuwata was inspired to write after Tokyo won the Olympics bid.

At SXSW 2017, the 8K VR ride will be available for showgoers to experience at the Austin Convention Center, Exhibit Hall 3, from March 12-14 (10 a.m.-4 p.m.) and March 15 (10 a.m.-12 noon).

Continue reading here:

SXSW: 8K Virtual-Reality Ride From Tokyo Requires No Headset ... - Variety

March 7, 2017 5:03 PM

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) Virtual reality is expanding the creative horizons of filmmaking, and thats being reflected in this years Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival.

The dates for the largest film event in the Midwest were announced Tuesday. Officials with the Film Society of Minneapolis-St. Paul, which puts on the festival, say it will run from April 13-29, bringing 250 films from more than 70 countries to Minnesota audiences.

Part of the program will be a showcase of 11 virtual reality projects, which festival officials describe as best, most engaging and mind-expanding work in the medium in the last few years.

The Virtual Reality and the Future of Storytelling Exhibition will run from April 21-25 at the St. Anthony Main Theatre, where most of the festival screenings take place. Admission will be free and open to the public.

A sampling of the experiences in the VR showcase include: the terror of walking a plank atop a skyscraper (Richies Plank Experience): being accosted by relatives after coming out (Out of Exile: Daniels Story); and exploring the changing landscape of the Amazon jungle (Under the Canopy). You can read the full list of VR projects here.

Also part of the VR showcase is a panel discussion on the future of the medium.

The panel will feature virtual reality filmmakers discussing how the technology is proving to be an immensely disruptive force in cinema, forcing filmmakers to rethink the possibilities of visual storytelling. The panel discussion is slated for April 22 at the Mill Artists Lofts Performance Hall in Minneapolis.

As for the hundreds of old-fashioned films playing at the festival, the full lineup will be revealed on March 23.

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Cinema Expanding: MSPIFF 2017 To Hold Virtual Reality Showcase - CBS Minnesota / WCCO

Tech evangelists predicted that 2016 would be the year of virtual reality. And in some ways they were right. Several virtual reality headsets finally hit the commercial market, and millions of people bought one. But as people begin immersing themselves in new realities, a growing number of worrisome reports have surfaced: VR systems can make some users sick.

Scientists are just beginning to confirm that these new headsets do indeed cause a form of motion sickness dubbed VR sickness. Headset makers and software developers have worked hard to combat it, but people are still getting sick. Many in the industry fear this will be a major obstacle to mass adoption of virtual reality.

A lot of VR, people today cannot tolerate, says Kay Stanney, a human factors engineer with a focus on VR at Design Interactive in Orlando, Fla. Search for VR sickness on Twitter, she says, and youll see that people are getting sick every day.

Around 25 to 40 percent of people suffer from motion sickness depending on the mode of transport, scientists have estimated, and more women are susceptible than men.

Count me among those women. Im highly prone to motion sickness. Cars, planes and boats can all make me feel woozy. It can take me a day or more to fully shake the nausea, headache and drowsiness. Certain that virtual reality would also make me sick, Ive purposefully avoided strapping on a headset. (Until this assignment came along.)

Women who got sick playing a VR horror game

Men who got sick playing the game

So far, avoiding VR hasnt been much of a loss for me. A lot of the VR industry is focused on video games, vying for a chunk of an estimated $100 billion market. And most of the early adopters who are willing to pay for one of the new premium headsets $400 for Sonys PlayStation VR or $800 for an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive are probably serious gamers or technophiles. I dont fit either category.

But, avoidance promises to become harder as VR moves beyond games. The technology has already begun creeping into other fields. Car companies, including Audi, General Motors Co.and used-car seller Vroom, are building VR showrooms where you can check out cars as if you were actually on the lot. Architects are using VR to walk clients through buildings that dont yet exist. Schools and learning labs are taking students on virtual field trips to both contemporary and historical sites.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees virtual reality as the next big social platform. In 2014, Facebook bought Oculus VR, maker of the Rift headset, for around $2 billion. This is really a new communication platform, Zuckerberg wrote in the Oculus announcement. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures. New VR sites where people can socialize or play games together in virtual spaces, like AltspaceVR and Rec Room, are springing up. And some tech luminaries see a future in which VR is integrated into many more aspects of our daily lives, from movies and entertainment to work and health care.

Nobody knows if the broader public will embrace virtual reality. Sales of the expensive high-end headsets have been underwhelming the three premium systems combined sold an estimated 1.5 million headsets in 2016. But sales of cheaper mobile headsets were more impressive. For less than $100, Samsung Gear VR, Google Daydream View, Google Cardboard and others are powered by your mobile phone. But with smaller screens and less computer power, they are far less capable than the Rift or the Vive. Still, they are selling. In January, Samsung reported that it had sold 5 million of the $99 Gear VR headset since its release in November 2015.

But VR may never really catch on if it makes people sick. And while VR companies and developers are confident that theyll find solutions, many motion sickness experts are pessimistic. My hunch is that [the solutions] are extremely limited, says Steven Rauch, director of the Vestibular Division at Massachusetts Eye and Ear in Boston.

In some ways, the very premise of virtual reality makes it an ideal vehicle for motion sickness.

Motion sickness has probably been with us as long as weve had boats. References to seasickness date back to Greek mythology; the word nausea is derived from the Greek naus, meaning ship. J.A. Irwin introduced the term motion sickness in the scientific literature in 1881. Since then, an extensive body of research has accumulated.

The most widely accepted theory to emerge is that motion sickness is brought on by a mismatch between two or more of the senses that help you keep your balance. For example, when youre below deck on a ship at sea, your eyes see a stationary room. But your vestibular system the fluid-filled canals and specialized membranes in your inner ear senses the motion of the ship as it rolls over waves. Youre getting conflicting information on different sensory channels into the balance system, Rauch says. That is believed to be the primary cause of motion sickness.

In virtual reality, the mismatch is there as well, says visual neuroscientist Bas Rokers of the University of WisconsinMadison. But the sensory cues are reversed: Your eyes see that you are moving through the virtual world in a virtual car or a virtual spaceship, or strolling down a virtual path but your vestibular system knows youre not actually moving. That gives you a cue conflict, he says.

While most motion sickness experts think sensory mismatch is to blame, some disagree. Kinesiologist Thomas Stoffregen of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, whos been studying motion sickness for 25 years, thinks instability is the culprit. On a ship, the rolling motion puts you off balance, and that makes you sick, he says. Motion sickness situations are ones in which the control of your body is challenged somehow. If you dont rise to that challenge, then the contents of your stomach may rise.

This idea, known as the postural instability theory, can be applied to VR as well, Stoffregen says. If your eyes convince your brain that youre in the virtual world, your body will respond to it instead of the real world you are physically in, which can throw your balance off. Imagine sitting in a chair in the real world while riding in a car in the virtual world. As the car approaches a turn, youll want to lean into it, which could land you on the floor. The more convincing the virtual world is, the more likely you are to link the control of your body to what youre seeing, Stoffregen says. And in a virtual car, that is a mistake.

While the postural instability theory is outside the scientific mainstream, it offers an explanation for another mystery of motion sickness: why more women suffer than men.

Stoffregen and colleagues have shown repeatedly that its possible to predict who is likely to get motion sick in various circumstances by measuring postural sway the small, subconscious movements people make to stay balanced while standing still. By analyzing several aspects of sway, including the distance, direction and timing of the movements, the researchers have found that people who are susceptible to motion sickness sway differently than those who arent. And postural sway differs measurably between men and women. The difference, Stoffregen says, can be attributed to physical differences between the sexes, such as height and center of balance.

Stoffregens research suggests women are also more prone to VR sickness than men. In a study published in December in Experimental Brain Research, Stoffregen and colleagues measured the postural sway of 72 college students before they were asked to play one of two VR games for 15 minutes using an Oculus Rift DK2. The first game made two of 18 men and six of 18 women feel motion sick, not enough for a statistically significant difference.

But more than half of the students who played the horror game Affected, using a handheld controller to explore a dark, spooky building, reported feeling sick. Of the 18 women playing that game, 14 felt sick. Thats nearly 78 percent, compared with just over 33 percent of the men. When the scientists compared those results against the postural sway data, just as in their previous motion sickness studies, they found a measurable difference in sway between those who got sick and those who didnt (SN: 1/21/17, p. 7).

Rokers has another explanation for the gender difference that fits with the sensory mismatch theory. In a study published in January 2016 in Entertainment Computing, Rokers and colleagues looked at how visual acuity might affect susceptibility to VR sickness. Seventy-three people with either natural or corrected 20/20 vision completed a battery of visual tests and then spent up to 20 minutes in an Oculus Rift DK1 headset watching videos. The videos showed motion from different points of view, such as a drone flying around a bridge or a passenger in a car driving through mild traffic. Of the female participants, 75 percent felt sick enough to stop watching before the 20 minutes had passed, compared with 41 percent of the men.

People who were better at perceiving 3-D motion in the visual tests were more likely to feel sick. And on average, the women in the study performed better on the 3-D motion perception tests than the men.

Its not clear why women would have better visual acuity for 3-D motion, but the results suggest that the more sensitive you are to sensory cues, the more likely you are to detect a mismatch, Rokers says. If you can tell that your senses are providing you different information, then you are more likely to get motion sick.

Just being a woman doesnt necessarily mean youll be highly susceptible to motion sickness like I am. Lots of other factors are likely at play. Some research suggests Asians are more likely to suffer. People who get migraines are also unusually prone to motion sickness. Scientists at genetic-testing company 23andMe reported in Human Molecular Genetics in 2015 that they had found 35 genetic variants associated with car sickness. Age is also a factor: Infants are generally immune, susceptibility increases from age 2 to 15, and although it hasnt been my experience, the problem subsides for many people in adulthood.

Everybodys brain has a different capacity for processing motion, Rauch says. Just like some people are good with languages and some people are good with math, some people are good with motion processing, of doing this complex sensory-integration task. The people who are good at it become figure skaters and divers and gymnasts, he says. But there are other people who throw up if they ride backwards on the metro. That would be me.

Under the right circumstances, though, anyone with a functioning vestibular system can experience motion sickness nearly everyone stranded on a lifeboat in choppy seas will get sick.

Very little motion sickness research has been done on the latest VR headsets available to consumers. But Rauch says the very nature of VR, which is to trick your eyes into telling your brain youre in another world, is inviting a sensory conflict. Theres always going to be some sensory conflict, and so the VR is going to be more successful in people who can tolerate that, Rauch says. For me, he was clear: Its always going to be torture.

Story continues below slideshow

Some games, like theBlu: Encounter(screenshot shown on first slide)and Job Simulator (middle slide), are unlikely to cause sickness because they require little movement around the virtual world. The dinosaur-hunting game Island 359 (last slide)has a teleport option for more susceptible players.

The U.S. military was the first to report, in 1957, that virtual environments could be problematic: Flight simulators were making some pilots motion sick. Since then, many studies have confirmed that simulator sickness is a real problem.

One of the biggest tech hurdles for VR has been the inherent delay between when you move your head and when the display updates to reflect that movement. If the lag is too great, you can end up with a potentially vomit-inducing sensory mismatch. Todays high-end systems have capitalized on advances in displays, video rendering, motion tracking and computing to cut down the lag to the neighborhood of 20 milliseconds low enough to avoid triggering motion sickness. Theyve beaten most of the pure hardware problems, says Steven LaValle, a computer scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a former head scientist at Oculus.

But even with the best virtual reality system, what you do in the virtual world matters. If youre sitting or standing in one place in both the real world and the virtual world, youre very unlikely to feel sick. And as long as a step in the real world results in an equivalent step in the virtual world, moving around is fine too. All three of the premium headsets use external lasers to track the motion of the headset within a limited space up to 3.5 meters by 3.5 meters with the HTC Vive. But to explore further, youll need to use handheld controllers with buttons, triggers and directional touch pads to move your virtual self around, just as in a regular 2-D video game. Thats where things can go wrong.

I like to joke that the controller is like a sickness generator, says LaValle, who worked on reducing motion sickness while at Oculus. Every time you grab onto a controller, youre creating motions that are not corresponding perfectly to the physical world. And when thats being fed into your eyes and ears, then you have trouble.

The people creating the content for VR systems are taking the problem seriously, says Steve Bowler, cofounder of VR game company CloudGate Studio, based outside of Chicago. Developers are really, really focused on zero tolerance for user motion sickness.

On its face, it makes no sense that exposure to motion should bring on disabling nausea and vomiting. But we share this seemingly odd connection between our sense of balance and the gastrointestinal tract with many nonhuman animals, including dogs, monkeys, sheep, birds and even fish. The most often cited explanation is an evolutionary theory put forward by cognitive psychologist Michel Treisman in Science in 1977. Ingesting a poison can also mess with your balance system. So the body interprets the motion reaction as a symptom of poisoning and responds as it would with poison, by vomiting to try to get rid of the harmful substance, he suggested. Although its just an idea and has never been tested, it has some intuitive appeal.

One of the most successful strategies developers have hit on is using teleportation to take short skips around the virtual world. Basically you aim the controller where you want to go and the screen fades to black for a split second, sort of like the blink of an eye. When it fades back in, youre at the new location. This, Bowler says, eliminates motion sickness even for the most susceptible people he knows. But that comfort comes at a cost: The whole point of VR is to convince you that youre physically in this other world; if youre magically teleporting here and there, its not going to feel as real, he says.

Bowler favors a technique known as sprint or dash that aims to reduce the effects of acceleration. Instead of gradually ramping your speed up and back down, a sprint bumps you up to speed almost instantaneously, maintains that speed until you reach your target and then drops you quickly back down to a standstill.

While sprinting doesnt approximate natural movement very well, it does let you see the motion, unlike teleportation. And Bowler says hes had about a thousand people at various events try sprinting in a dinosaur-hunting game his group built called Island 359 with almost no reports of motion sickness. Anyone who feels uncomfortable can switch to chasing dinosaurs using a teleportation option instead.

Oculus seems to have accepted that VR sickness cant be eliminated from all VR experiences at the moment, so most Oculus-approved games come with comfort ratings to let users know if a game or experience is more or less likely to make them sick. Those assessments might help people like me avoid the most nauseating games.

Bowler considers himself an ambassador for virtual reality. After almost an hour of very patiently and enthusiastically explaining how VR works, he somehow convinced me to try it. A few days later I was at UploadVR in San Francisco strapping on the HTC Vive with Bowler looking on via Skype from his office in the Chicago suburbs.

The headset was heavy and awkward, but I otherwise felt fine while creating a virtual 3-D painting or walking around on the deck of a shipwreck as an enormous blue whale swam by ogling me. I even shot at drones while dodging virtual bullets, with no hint of motion sickness. I decided I was ready to hunt dinosaurs.

First I tried teleportation mode in Bowlers game, and as he promised, no nausea. Though the splatters of blood and guts when I slashed some attacking mini dinosaurs was almost enough to make me gag, the strangeness of teleportation made me feel more like I was inside a 2-D video game than on a dinosaur-infested island. I decided to see if I could handle sprint mode. I wanted to know if it would feel more real.

That was a mistake. I could only manage about a half dozen sprints before I felt the first hints of nausea. I had to quit. Once the headset was off I felt better. But soon, a lingering nausea and drowsiness hit, like I sometimes experience after a turbulent flight. I didnt entirely recover until the following evening. Im glad Bowler convinced me to give it a try, and the parts I could handle were pretty fun. But I wont be going back for more anytime soon.

Virtual reality still has lots of room for improvement, but whether it will ever reach the point of being comfortable for everyone is an open question. The VR industry is moving at a pace science cant match, forging ahead with its own grand experiment as millions of users test its products. Much of what we learn about how VR affects people will show up first in living rooms and on Twitter rather than in scientific labs and journals. And though the results of those experiments are still coming in, tech luminaries havent hesitated to declare 2017 as the real year of virtual reality.

A slew of possible solutions for VR sickness most with very little research behind them have been suggested by scientists, developers, companies, entrepreneurs and users.

Here are just a few:

This article appears in the March 18, 2017, issue of Science News with the headline, "Real sick: The immersive experience of the virtual world is not for everyone."

Excerpt from:

Virtual reality has a motion sickness problem - Science News

This time last year, visitors to Mobile World Congress 2016 in Barcelona remarked on the sudden prevalence of virtual reality (VR) tech on many of the stands.

Look at how to orchestrate the variety of devices in use, and how to achieve efficient workforce mobility.

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Then, memorably, Samsung brought the technology to global attention when it enlisted Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg for a viral demonstration at the launch of its Galaxy S7 handsets.

Consumer virtual reality is all well and good, but in the 12 months since Samsungs PR stunt, most of the VR headsets that were given away free with new smartphones have gone largely unused, treated as a curiosity for a few weeks before ending up in a cupboard.

More attention is being paid to the idea of augmented reality (AR), which like its more immersive VR cousin had a viral moment in the summer of 2016 when millions took to the streets to hunt and collect cute little animals in the hit AR game Pokmon Go.

It would probably be fair to say that VR is walking a long path to widespread acceptance and use, but even if consumers arent yet doing much with it beyond playing video games, the technology continues to advance at pace, and is finding new use cases in many fields.

Some of the most interesting applications, and perhaps the most relevant to society, are to be found in the field of healthcare.

Once upon a time, Wendy Powell of Portsmouth University worked as a private chiropractor, but she returned to academia to take a degree in computing and IT, which she followed up with a doctorate in creative technologies, for which she studied walking behaviour in VR.

Now senior lecturer in applications of VR at Portsmouth Universitys School of Creative Technologies, Powell conducts extensive research into the use of VR and interactive technologies for health and well-being, and regularly represents the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) on VR topics.

My key interest is physical rehabilitation and how we can leverage VR tech for physical rehabilitation. There are a wide variety of different applications there, she tells Computer Weekly.

As previously explored during the early stages of her research, a great deal of Powells work to date has centred on the use of VR for stroke patients, using certain properties of VR, such as the ability to change where people see their hands moving, to regain control of their movements.

Stroke patients can also benefit from programmes that help them simulate basic tasks that may have to be relearned after an attack. This could include boiling a kettle safely, with no risk of scalding oneself, says Powell, or relearning how to cross a road in an environment where there is no danger of being struck by a vehicle.

VR is proving to be of similar use in fields such as physiotherapy, where it is being used to make mundane exercises a little more interesting for patients.

If you can gamify exercise in VR, where your movements are tracked and get feedback, the patients are more actively engaged

Wendy Powell, IEEE

If you have to get somebody to do a specific exercise 100 times, its incredibly boring, and as soon as the patient starts to feel a bit better, they stop doing it, says Powell.

If you can gamify the exercise in VR, where your movements are being tracked and theres feedback from those movements, the patients are more actively engaged.

Thats only part of it, she continues. If you go away and do 100 repetitions, you might have done them really badly, but if youre doing it inside VR and using full-body tracking at the same time, you can look at your performance over time.

One of the most interesting areas of research for VR practitioners in the healthcare sector is to help amputees manage their conditions. Statistics show that over 90% of amputees continue to feel their absent limb as if it was still there, a condition known as phantom limb.

People experience these sensations in a number of different ways, such as tingling, itching or twitching, or even trying to make a gesture. However for many amputees the experience of having phantom limb is overwhelmingly painful. It is very common for patients to be on very strong doses of medication to manage that.

Using visualisation to reduce the pain is one technique that has gained some traction, but this is quite difficult to do and depends a lot on the ability of the patient to internalise and believe that, for example, a reflected image of a complete limb in a mirror box is their own.

However, researchers are now beginning to understand that there is actually something about VR that reduces pain.

Trials with amputees have shown that by using electromyography (EMG) a diagnostic technique that detects the electrical potential of muscle cells when they are activated muscle movements made in the amputees upper arm, for example, in an attempt to control and move the absent forearm can be rendered in a VR environment.

So if I use the upper arm muscles that clench my fist, the EMG reads the intent to clench the fist, even if there is no fist. We can use that to clench an animated fist, so that when they have the headset on they can see the animation, says Powell.

This is what we call emotive visual feedback. The patient connects the loop back and tells the brain that the hand is okay and they can move it. That seems to be a very powerful tool not just to reduce pain, but to allow the patient to mentally let go of some of the problems of having a missing limb.

Obviously, amputees cannot spend the rest of their lives in a VR environment, but Powell envisages that in the future, once prescription protocols for VR are properly developed, people may use it a couple of times a day to help them manage their pain without needing to fall back on powerful drugs. This would, however, require extensive clinical trials.

Powell is at pains to point out that there are still many other unknowns when it comes to VR. She compares its development to something like a drug trial being conducted in reverse. Weve found a drug that works, which is called VR, she says, but what we dont know yet are the ingredients, or precisely how its working.

The need to find out exactly VR reduces pain is an urgent one. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) scans of the human brain do indeed show that the pain sensors of the brain do indeed dull their activity when the patient is in VR, Powell explains, but the jury is still out on why this should be the case, or at what level of the brain it is being driven.

In physiotherapy work, the very fact that VR is being used to change how people are behaving means there can be other negative effects. Powell compares it to the early days of the Nintendo Wii games system, when there was a brief fad for exercise games, such as Wii Tennis.

However, players very quickly discovered that they could trick the system to win more easily by swinging from the wrist instead of from the shoulder as a tennis player would. This caused a lot of cases of repetitive strain injury (RSI).

Yes, you can use VR and experiment with it but you have to be very aware that it changes how people behave and lets them cheat because patients cheat and VR doesnt stop them from doing that, says Powell.

The other, more publicised problem with VR is that it can make users feel slightly nauseous, which is not ideal when they may already be ill. In the early days of VR, this was largely a hardware issue, with graphics taking too long to render if the user moved their head too quickly. This problem has largely been developed out now, but others have taken its place.

One is what we call accommodation convergence conflict, which sounds terribly complex but really its that VR is tricking my eyes into thinking that youre sitting over there but the screen Im looking at is here, so my eyes are focusing on a screen here but trying to interpret you as being further away, says Powell.

That conflict between where my eyes are actually focusing and where theyre virtually focusing can cause eye strain as well, so thats one issue we havent solved yet. Some of that is about good VR design and where you get people to look.

Most of the cyber sickness problems now are either core design or the conflict between what you expect to feel and what you actually feel. So if Im sitting in a motionless chair and in VR Im hurtling down a rollercoaster, Im going to feel sick because Im not moving and yet everything in my vision is.

As an example, one demo tried at Portsmouth saw Powell being floated around a VR Roman villa environment, an experience she found very nauseating because it gave her the sensation of moving without actually physically moving.

One way to solve this could be to build moving elements into the external environment, such as a vibrating chair like you might find in a fairground flight simulator. Meanwhile, inside the VR villa the users avatar could be being carried around in a litter chair, and both the external and internal stimuli would match up. Of course this would be very expensive, so in practice it is more likely that the problem will be solved through closer attention to VR scenario design.

If designers can match the narrative to their input technique, its much better, says Powell. If the user is sitting, have the VR narrative have them sitting, or teleport them instantaneously. Dont make them walk as an avatar if theyre in a chair.

Theres a lot of research being done on this. The IEEE VR conference is doing a great deal of technical underpinning research to look at things like stable horizons and frame of reference; things we can use to reduce nausea.

Nevertheless, Powell has found that, whether it is being used to help elderly people learn exercises to keep active and remain in their own homes; to make sure people with broken bones keep on top of their physio; or to help amputees relieve their pain, VR is being well accepted across the board.

When I was first using VR, there was an inherent bias where I expected elderly people in particular to be very resistant, but they actually often engaged with it very well as long as was not complex or cumbersome, she says.

Thats why mobile VR excites me, because were using that with people in their 80s and above who put a headset on and there are no wires, theres nothing to worry about catching their hands, its not uncomfortable, and they just engage with it.

Amputees, particularly those with injuries sustained during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, tend to be even more enthusiastic. Young and otherwise fit people dont want a lifetime of taking morphine or other similar drugs to manage their pain; they prefer to be as drug free as possible.

A lot of them will say I will try anything, literally anything that can solve my pain. One of them told me if I could stick it in a fire to get rid of it I would, if I could have it amputated again I would, says Powell.

So when you find something thats not just helpful but is actually quite fun too, people get pretty excited. The pain can be intense. But where you can repurpose something like VR to help, why wouldnt you try it?

Clinicians, too, are increasingly open to the power of VR in healthcare, says Powell, much more than they were in the past, because the technology has advanced to the point where all you need to use it is a smartphone and a headset.

Its another tool for doctors to use, and they want everything they can get to help their patients manage their pain, says Powell.

If they have another tool in their armoury, particularly one they can send patients home with like mobile VR, that helps with pain management and improves quality of life for their patients, then they will try it.

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MWC 2017: How virtual reality could be the next big thing for healthcare - ComputerWeekly.com