Virtual Reality One Step Closer to Reality

Creating effective virtual-reality setups has proven very hard and costly to achieve, especially because it's difficult to provide a convincing sensation of motion. Until now, scientists have tried to create this sensation by actually allowing the user to move – e.g. on a walking platform. But the results were not very encouraging.

The Swedish-German POEMS project has tried a different strategy – they decided to use the visual illusion of motion. The illusion is familiar: for example, when you are standing in a train and you are looking at another train that starts moving, you get the sensation that your own train has started to move. Researchers have used this illusion, together with auditory signals, to create the impression of motion to somebody who is actually standing still.

For achieving this, they relied especially on the peripheral visual information. In regard to acoustics, scientists found that, unsurprisingly, the use of sounds such as church bells or fountains, passing from one ear to the other, created a much more vivid impression of motion than the use of moving car sounds.

"For the acoustics we found that realistic sounds are more effective than synthetic (sounds) and likewise stationary sources, such as church bells, are more effective than moving sources such as the sound of a car," said Dr Pontus Larsson from Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden.

The prototype simulated a market place in Tübingen, Germany, and although the participants were seated, with headphones and a screen in front of them, they got the distinct feeling of moving, as the image on the screen in front of them turned around the square.

However, the simulator doesn't yet function perfectly: "One of the findings in testing the simulator was that participants experienced a slight delay in motion. We are now working on reducing this to zero," explains Dr Bernhard Riecke, the POEMS project coordinator for the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. "None of the participants in the test, however, reported any motion sickness and even in other tests we have not registered any discomfort."

Other virtual reality simulators do produce motion sickness to many participants. Motion sickness appears when the brain receives conflicting information about whether you are moving or standing still. So, the fact that the POEMS simulator does not cause motion sickness is somehow surprising. Although this simulator was only designed to prove the concept and further research is needed, the project's final aim is a commercial product.


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