Virtual Reality (VR) is a technology that allows you to be in a virtual space, and experience a 3-dimensional environment inside of the 3-dimensional world that we live in. According to DREME, an early childhood math education project by Stanford, how we view the world around us, a term called spatial awareness, is something that begins to develop when we are young children. The definition of spatial awareness (perception), according to Cognifit, is the ability to be aware of your relationships with the environment around you and with yourself. VR experiences push our brain’s perception of reality by recreating what we experience every day in the real world.
Spatial awareness allows us to understand the 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional world and articulate all of the things we take in around us and relate them to ourselves. There are two different kinds of spatial awareness through which we understand the world: visual and haptic.
The human visual system relies on eye receptors located in the back of the eye called the retina. These receptors gather visual information and send it to the brain for processing. The haptic system embodies the sense of active touch. Both systems work together to create a complete perception of the world.
When developing VR, it is incredibly important to activate both the visual and haptic senses for a person’s perceptual experience to emulate the real world.
“Immersion, interaction, and imagination are three features of virtual reality,” said Dangxiao Wang, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Beihang University. “Existing VR systems possess fairly realistic visual and auditory feedback, and however, are poor with haptic feedback, by means of which human can perceive the physical world via abundant haptic properties.”
The only way VR will become a fully immersive experience is if there are more powerful haptic devices developed, Wang said.
The Teslasuit, a pioneering haptic feedback solution for VR provides motion capture capabilities and biometric sensors, which allow trainees to improve their ability to perform under pressure. This company currently provides solutions for public safety, athletics, and rehabilitation. While this suit is still in clinical trials for some of its applications, it is a step in the direction of virtual reality being consumed and understood like actual reality, enterprise, public safety, athletics, and rehabilitation.
As visual and haptic cues heavily influence spatial awareness the continued maturity of these systems within VR will create more lifelike environments. In time, not only will we see the world through VR, we will feel it.
