Virtual Reality

Researchers in Japan have developed a virtual reality platform that mimics the sensation of walking by stimulating their hands and feet, all while sitting motionlessly. During testing, participants using the platform experiencing a digital world through a first-person perspective found it enhanced the simulation of walking. However, those who saw themselves from a third-person perspective felt it impaired the sensation of movement.

In an ideal world, virtual reality would be just like regular reality, except without regular reality’s annoying restrictions on human flight, teleportation, endless/consequence-free consumption, etc. As it is VR, it is inescapably VR—you can lose yourself, but only to a point. This has to do partly with the technology’s bulkiness, but also its sensory limitations. Smell and taste, two fairly major components of regular reality—key to memory, present-time enjoyment, and more—do not factor into commercial VR equipment. Of course, this problem isn’t unknown to the score of researchers presently working on VR, and over the last few years, in labs all over the world, these researchers have made real advances in the realm(s) of sensorial verisimilitude. For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to some of them for insight into these developments.