Aweh, I opened the package and stepped into the virtual world. It was virtuous.
In this bonus blogpost I will describe how I travelled with the VR setup to Cape Town and what VR promises for travelling in the near future.
Travelling with VR – the practical now
Before I could further immerse myself and others in a virtual world, I had to travel in the real world. I had to bring the VR setup from The Netherlands to South Africa. So how do you travel with a VR setup? How do you ship two giant boxes of delicate hardware from a little country in Europe to the southern point of Africa? The answer is fairly simple and contains a grocery bag, styrofoam, a carry-on suitcase, some sweat, and an annoyed wife. You just bring the entire setup (PC included) on the plane as carry-on luggage.
Friends and family thought I was crazy and it would be impossible. However, people bring all kinds of weird stuff on the plane[1]. Before ordering, I made sure that the size and weight of the VR setup (especially the PC) was compatible with the restrictions of the airline (<12KG, 55 x 35 x 25 cm)[2]. After doing some research online, I decided to wrap the PC in a blanket, put stryofoam on all sides, and put it in a grocery bag. The Vive was straightforward as well. The Vive comes in a neat box, with little compartments for the different components of the setup. I just put all the necessary compartments (head-mounted display, motion trackers, controllers) in a carry-on suitcase, made sure it was tight, cables in the checked luggage and off we went. The downside of the approach I took is that you need a companion that is willing to travel altruistically, i.e. to bring your carry-on luggage while leaving her own. Also, it looks ridiculous.
Amazingly in these times of airport restrictions, secondary inspections, and general travel angst, I did not have any problem at all bringing a VR setup onboard. The carry-on suitcase with the HTC Vive went through inspection without any hassle, or questions asked, and the PC was checked on drugs, but was left in the “protective case of blanket+stryofoam”. That’s it. A bit of an anticlimax (especially for friends and family that hoped for some trouble). This is how you travel with VR at the moment, but how do we travel in the future?
Travelling with VR – the future space
During the flight to Cape Town I thought about how VR could change travelling. The state-of-the-art in air travel is hundreds of people in a confined space with the sole inflight entertainment coming from a small movie screen and the elbow of your neighbor and the knees of the person behind you[3]. What if instead of watching movies on a small screen, you could be immersed in a full 360 degrees movie. Or you could travel the world while travelling the world[4]. You could walk through nature, already experience the city you’re travelling to, or simply enjoy the comfort of you home, while being in the lower regions of the stratosphere.
This isn’t just daydreaming. My thoughts were grounded in reality[5], and inspired by the work of Mel Slater and his lab at the University of Barcelona. In a recent article in Scientific Reports, they showed that it is possible to create the illusion that people are walking outdoors while sitting on a chair indoors. In short, seated participants (n = 28), fitted with a head-mounted display, entered a virtual world in which they saw a standing virtual body. Importantly, participants were only able to look around the virtual environment with head movements. At one point the virtual body started to walk across the virtual environment and eventually climbed a hill (see the video for more details).
When they saw the world through the eyes of the virtual body[6], the participants felt not only as if they were in the virtual world, but also had the illusion that they themselves were walking and that the leg movements were their own. Walking while sitting. Does it also result in objective changes? Yes, when the virtual body climbed the hill, skin conductance (a measure of arousal) and heart rate increased[7]. Thus, with VR you can create the illusion of walking while in fact you are sitting still with no leg movements whatsoever.
Of course, this study has much more depth than I currently acknowledge. It is relevant to the study of agency, predictive coding, action perception, and paraplegia. But for the travel edition of the blog, I highlight the practical implications. You can sit in a chair in a Boeing Dreamliner or Airbus-A380, put on your head-mounted display and enter and move through a completely different environment. Imagine, two hundred people side-by-side in an airplane all in a different or shared environment.
To impact of VR on travelling is an active research field. The highlighted work has been part of a larger body of work, the VR-HYPERSPACE project. In this multidisciplinary project researchers investigated ways to improve passenger comfort (see the video). Besides VR, the project investigated some exciting new approaches and technologies. In the future you will travel in an invisible plane and with inflight entertainment shown on a multi-user 3D display. Again this is not me daydreaming. Last year, Qantas tried out the Samsung Gear in their first class. VR, going places.
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Upcoming posts:
The next blogpost: a brief history of Virtual Reality
The next journal club post: Blascovich et al. (2002). Immersive virtual environment technology as a methodological tool for social psychology. Psychological Inquiry, 13:103-124.
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[1] My favorite junk TV-show: “Border Security: Australia’s Front Line”
[2] The Alienware Aurora is about 12KG
[3] The “aisle clogger”, the “drinker”, “odour offender” or “luggage hog”, these 19 different passenger types are brilliant
[4] Cheesy I know
[5] Ish, again cheesy
[6] Compared to a third person perspective, thus when seeing the virtual body from a short distance
[7] Again, first > third person perspective
Adventures in Virtual Reality 