Virtual Reality – an overview | ScienceDirect Topics

Conclusions and Future Directions

IVR is a system that blocks out the physical world, providing rich sensory fidelity wherein the user feels and responds to the virtual world, as if it were real. However, little is known about how IVR relates to child development. The little research examining young children and IVR suggests that they may have experiences unique to their age range. Brain development, EF, dual representation, and self-recognition (i.e., avatars, virtual doppelgangers, and TSI) in virtual environment may be important topics to consider regarding research on children's experiences in IVR. Basic questions related to presence, safety, and virtual characters in IVR also need to be answered before taking the steps to create effective content. For example, in IVR, virtual characters can mimic the child's behaviors, provide varying degrees of eye contact, or vary in size, with each of these factors potentially influencing the child's social behavior and learning. While television research provides the foundation for children's VR research, IVR can create content not possible in the physical world, and could elicit unknown reactions (i.e., emotional responses to standing in front of a virtual character 3 times the child's size).

Children may have strong reactions to IVR because they are still developing the skill of experiencing fully immersive technologies. For instance, there is some speculation that older children's attention to television content is less susceptible to formal features (e.g., cuts, zooms, music) because through experience, they have learned when and how to watch content based on those features (Anderson & Kirkorian, 2013). Perhaps, as children gain more experience with IVR, they will learn a type of immersive formal feature skill that could help them navigate in and out of immersive technologies. How children experience IVR may relate to their higher-order cognitive skills such as EF and dual representation, because the salient sensory feedback in IVR could challenge their behavioral and emotional regulation. If IVR could easily pull children into the content and elicit automatic responses related to attention and action, it may be a platform to develop new ways of measuring EF skills such as inhibitory control.

On November 8, 2015, the New York Times gave their Sunday print subscribers access to VR (Somaiya, 2015; Wohlsen, 2015). Placed neatly and easily in their newspapers, more than a million people had an inexpensive piece of cardboard in which after just a couple of minutes they could fold into an HMD that uses their phone as the screen. For the first time, millions of people had access to VR at the same time. Wired magazine writer, Wohlsen (2015), highlighted the potential implications of children having greater access to IVR, he writes, But for good or ill, [the cardboard HMD] is just good enough to imprint a new paradigm on a nation of 8-year-olds. From now on, kids who've had the VR experience have a new set of expectations of what it should mean to interact with a computer. Imagine what they'll expect by the time they're 18. Although it had limited content and on the lower end of some immersive features (i.e., level of tracking), the New York Times roll out of VR demonstrated the children's access to immersive technologies is here.

Research with adult populations has shown IVR to have powerful effects on attitudes, behaviors, and physiology. IVR can be a technology that provides high degrees of immersion placing users directly into digital content, creating the illusion that the experience is real. Some research suggests that young children may experience virtual content differently from adults. Researchers, scholars, and VR developers need to examine the developmental issues related to the intersection of the immersive features and content of IVR further to determine what use of the technology are appropriate for which ages and how IVR can be used to enhance youth's lives. Children and adolescents are avid and early adopters of media. With broad access to VR breaching the horizon, it is expected that all ages will be interacting with immersive virtual environments. More than ever, it is a time to understand what these technological experiences mean for being a kid and what it means for human development.

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Virtual Reality - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics