Virtual reality technology and empathy – Times of Malta

A scene of a classroom from the VR and Autism project, showing the perspective of the child diagnosed with autism. The user wearing the VR headset would experience the sights and sounds of the classroom from a different perspective, highlighting the perceptions of a child with autism. Photo: Joseph Camilleri

We were all children. We think that as adults we are able to understand children because we have experienced childhood ourselves. But not many of us have experienced autism or growing up with a family who felt it safer to traverse treacherous countries and seas illegally in the hope for a better and safer future. Nor can many of us boast being able to walk in these childrens shoes while understanding and empathising with them.

The University of Maltas Department of Artificial Intelligence, in collaboration with the Department of Digital Arts, has embarked upon two projects using creative arts and virtual reality (VR) technology to develop two VR apps designed to support empathy. Both apps have been designed as experiences to empower users through authentic multisensorial experiences captured in 3D.

One of the VR experiences has been created to mimic the world surrounding a child who has been diagnosed with autism. For this project, parents, teachers and learning support assistants provided sources of information about the childs reactions and about stimuli that might disturb the child during the daily motions of life in the classroom.

The experience, which was filmed in a real school setting, makes use of sounds and 360 visuals to provide a realistic immersive setting. This immersive VR experience can then be used as part of the training of new teachers and other people who interact with such children. It can be used as a key to the development of an empathic understanding, which will help users to resonate with the learner who is in some way affected by the condition.

The same principle is applied to the second VR app aimed at addressing multicultural situations in the classroom.

The phenomenon of migration has increased drastically in this past decade. People are driven out of their homes by war and terrorism, seeking safer locations. Most often, we have heard harrowing stories of migrants arduous journey as they travel from their native country to other countries promising safety and refuge.

In this project, the virtual reality experience exposes the migration experiences and how these might come out in daily classroom life. Users are once again transported to a realistic classroom setting, where actions that might be meaningless to teachers and students trigger a series of immersive flashbacks in migrant children.

The VR experience is not only intended to highlight the plight of migrants journeys, but also to get a glimpse into the hopes and aspirations of these voyagers.

Dr Vanessa Camilleri is a lecturer with the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the Faculty of ICT, University of Malta.

Engineers are using soft robotics technology to make light, flexible gloves that allow users to feel tactile feedback when they interact with virtual reality environments. The researchers used the gloves to realistically simulate the tactile feeling of playing a virtual piano keyboard.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170530140713.htm

Researchers are using VR to teach the principles behind string theory, which posits that the universe is built not just from three spatial dimensions (up/down, side/side, forward/backward) and the single dimension of time, but at least six other dimensions. These other dimensions would be too small for humans to detect, but according to the theory, the six dimensions play a major role in controlling particles. VR is used to explain these concepts which might be otherwise too difficult to demonstrate.

https://www.wired.com/2017/06/string-theorys-weirdest-ideas-finally-make-sense-thanks-vr/

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Virtual reality technology creates a stereoscopic 3D image by angling the two 2D images to mimic how each of our two eyes views the world ever-so-slightly differently.

A VR set is able to track your head movement through a system called 6DoF (six degrees of freedom), which plots your head in terms of your X, Y and Z axis to measure head movements forward and backwards, side to side and shoulder to shoulder, otherwise known as pitch, yaw and roll.

Psychological Presence is central to virtual reality, whereby the brain forgets that it is in a virtual space and immerses into the perceptual illusion offered by the VR experience.

Google designed a cardboard head mount for smartphones as a low-cost VR system. Instructions to make your own cardboard head mount can be found online.

Virtual reality is used in many sectors, including in medicine for things like surgical training and drug design. Nowadays, through VR technology, it is also possible for a surgeon in one location to perform a surgery through a robot in a different location.

The first research towards VR was in 1938 when Charles Wheatstone demonstrated that the brain processes the different two-dimensional images from each eye into a single object of three dimensions.

For more trivia see:www.um.edu.mt/think

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Virtual reality technology and empathy - Times of Malta