Jacqueline Fulvio, a post doctoral researcher, wears an Oculus Rift headset and plays a game of “3D Pong” at the Rokers Vision Laboratory.
In a recent study, two UW-Madison researchers conducted an experiment having subjects play a virtual reality version of the arcade game Pong. Wearing an Oculus Rift headset, the participants were tasked with whacking a virtual ball with a virtual paddle.
To the researchers’ surprise, the subjects hit the ball only 20 percent of the time. That got the scientists — Bas Rokers, a UW-Madison psychology professor and Jacqueline Fulvio, a postdoctoral researcher — thinking about what was missing from the virtual playing field.
“It occurred to us this is another missing piece of the puzzle. In the real world when you do something you get feedback about what happened, whether you were right or wrong,” Fulvio says.
Although VR headsets allow users to turn their heads to view the environment from any angle, the majority of participants in Rokers’ and Fulvio’s experiment did not move their heads enough to pick up on the visual cues needed for accurate motion and depth perception.
“What our results show is that people treat [VR] like a display, they don’t treat it like the real world,” said Rokers, likening the experience to passive TV viewing.
Implementing audible signals — ‘swoosh’ for a miss and ‘cowbell’ for a hit — along with visual feedback gave the participants a better understanding of how they were performing in “3D Pong.” With feedback, participants could now see the ball’s last position, allowing them to predict its trajectory. Once again, VR users had to learn to interpret cues in their new, virtual environment, as they had done when they were children in the real world.
“This was super exciting,” Fulvio says. “You assume people are going to treat the virtual world like the real world, but lo and behold, they actually don’t. They need some training to figure it out.”
This finding has implications for the VR industry, which is being increasingly used not
Bas Rokers has found that no matter how real virtual reality looks, people respond to it differently.
just in gaming but also for education and training. Before learning how to dodge enemies or soar like an eagle, VR users must relearn how to use visual cues taken for granted in the real world, the two found in their study published in Nature Scientific Reports,
Rokers, a psychology professor, says developers often believe that the trick to creating great virtual reality is to faithfully replicate the real world.
“If you talk to somebody who is more on the end of psychology or neuroscience, they might say, ‘Well, actually that might not be true,’” Rokers says. “There will be slight differences between what you can possibly present in a virtual device and what is actually present in the natural environment.”
In other words, the brain interprets virtual worlds — no matter how realistic — differently than it interprets reality. This concept will become increasingly important as companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook begin rolling out VR technologies.
Rokers has spent his career studying how the brain perceives the visual world. For his latest research into 3D motion perception, VR has become the cornerstone of his experimental design.
“The reason why virtual reality is great is because it provides us with a way of having this controlled environment,” Fulvio says. “But at the same time it still allows us to more closely approximate the real world.”
VR enables Fulvio and Rokers to answer questions about the mystery of the brain’s visual system. “It’s just light falling on the retina,” Fulvio says, “yet somehow we perceive a single, coherent world.”
Gaming is just one way in which people can experience virtual reality. Rokers is currently studying how people with amblyopia (commonly known as lazy eye) a condition in which the two eyes become misaligned, can improve their vision through VR.
As VR technology improves and the price of headsets falls, companies like Google — which has funded Rokers’ lab this past year — have become receptive to the kind of research that he and Fulvio are doing in order to perfect the technology for a wider audience.
“They want this technology to be adopted not just by hard-core gamers, but by everybody,” Rokers says.
