Thomas Stoffregen and his team

I tracked down military reports about gender bias in simulator sickness, much of which dated back to the 1960s

This led me to run a series of psych experiments where my data suggested that people’s ability to be able to navigate 3D VR seems to be correlated with the dominance of certain sex hormones in their system. Folks with high levels of estrogen and low levels of testosterone – many of whom would identify as women – were more likely to get nauseous navigating VR than those who have high levels of testosterone streaming through their body. What was even stranger was that changes to hormonal levels appeared to shape how people respond to these environments.

i'll ask now maurice to tell us a bit about his work

Digital natives

Recognizing that the CEC hyperthreat operates at micro and macro scales across most forms of human activity and that a whole-of-society approach is required to combat it, the approach to the CEC hyperthreat partly relies on a philosophical pivot. The idea here is that a powerful understanding of the CEC hyperthreat (how it feels, moves, and operates), as well as the larger philosophical and survival-based reasons for hyper-reconfiguration, enables all actors and groups to design their own bespoke solutions. Consequently, the narrative and threat description act as a type of orchestration tool across many agencies. This is like the “shared consciousness” idea in retired U.S. Army general Stanley A. McChrystal’s “team of teams” approach to complexity.7       Such an approach is heavily dependent on exceptional communication of both the CEC hyperthreat and hyper-response pathways, as well as providing an enabling environment in terms of capacity to make decisions, access information and resources. This idea informs Operation Visibility and Knowability (OP VAK), which will be described later.  

CellPaint-VR, virtual-reality software that takes users into the cellscape.

Cost — it’s by far the most affordable headset in its class, and while I have a tendency to be lavish with my gadgetry I’m still a cheapskate: I love a good deal and a favorably skewed cost/benefit ratio even more.

Adapting to the new environment is immediate, like moving between rooms, and since the focal length in the headset matches regular human vision there’s no acclimating or adjustment.

I do highly contextual work, with multiple work orders and their histories open, supporting reference documentation, API specifications, several areas of code (and calls in the stack), tests, logs, databases, and GUIs — plus Slack, Spotify, clock, calendar, and camera feeds. I tend to only look at 25% of that at once, but everything is within a comfortable glance without tabbing between windows. Protecting that context and augmenting my working memory maintains my flow.

Realism will increase (perhaps to hyperrealism) and our ability to perceive and interact with simulated objects and settings will be indistinguishable to our senses. Acting in simulated contexts will have physical consequences as systems interpret and project actions into the world — telepresence will take a quantum leap, removing limitations of time and distance. Transcending today’s drone piloting, remote surgery, etc., we will see through remote eyes and work through remote hands anywhere.

It has a ton of promise, but… I don’t really care for the promise it’s making. 100% of what you can do in Workrooms is feasible in a physical setting, although it would be really expensive (lots of smart hardware all over the place). But that’s the thing: it’s imitating life within a tool that doesn’t share the same limitations, so as a VR veteran I find it bland and claustrophobic. That’s going to be really good for newcomers or casual users because the skeuomorphism is familiar, making it easy to immediately orient oneself and begin working together — and that illustrates a challenge in design vocabulary. While the familiar can provide a safe and comfortable starting point, the real power of VR requires training users for potentially unfamiliar use cases. Also, if you can be anywhere, why would you want to be in a meeting room, virtual-Lake Tahoe notwithstanding?

For meeting with those not in VR, or if I have a video call that needs input rather than passive attendance, I’ll frequently use a virtual webcam to attend by avatar. It’s sufficiently demonstrative for most team meetings, and the crew has gotten used to me showing up as a digital facsimile. I’ll surface from VR and use a physical webcam for anything sensitive or personal, however.

Meetings are best in person, in VR, in MURAL, and in Zoom — in that order. As a remote worker of several years, “in person” is a rarity for me — so I use VR to preserve the feeling of shared presence, of inhabiting a place with other people, especially when good spatial audio is used. Hand tracking enables meaningful gestures and animated expression, despite the avatars cartoonish appearance — somehow it all “just works”, your brain accepts that these people you know are embodied through these virtual puppets, and you get on with communicating instead of quibbling about missing realism (which will be a welcome improvement as it becomes available but doesn’t stop this from working right now).

What’s it like to actually use? In a word: comfortable. Given a few more words, I’d choose productive and effective. I can resize, reposition, add, or remove as much screen space as I need. I never have to squint or lean forward, crane my neck, hunt for an application window I just had open, or struggle to find a place for something. Many trade-offs and compromises from the past no longer apply — I put my apps in convenient locations I can see at a glance, and without getting in my way. I move myself and my gaze enough throughout the day that I’m not stiff at the end of it and experience less eye strain than I ever did with a bunch of desk-bound LCDs.

Since all I need is a keyboard, mouse, and a place to park myself, I’ve completely ditched the traditional desk. I can use a floor setup for part of the day and mix it up with a standing arrangement for the rest.

n Rebecca Elinich

And some VR designs are literally spaces of floating panels.

Ken Perlin on the mind field of virtual and future reality @ Gamelier

Tech Literacy Resources

a promising technology for decades that's never truly caught on. That's constantly changing with the current wave of VR products,

No available HMDs support VirtualLink at this writing, nor are we aware of any, but it's something to keep in mind if you're waffling between a GeForce RTX card and a last-generation GeForce GTX or a Radeon card for VR. Nothing is certain, but it's possible a future headset may debut with this as the optional or mandatory interface.

It’s not only a big win for HP, but a big win for the Windows Mixed Reality (WMR) platform, which arrived with a bit of a thud, but now has a headset truly worthy of seriously competing with HTC and Oculus .

IoT Technology Trends, Future Scope and Challenges in 2019

In VR systems, the main goals are to improve the optical performance and bring the price down.

Human beings are not just cognitive. By enabling an emotional, visceral, and cognitive experience, VR lets people retain knowledge at astonishingly higher rates of up to 80% as compared to traditional training mediums of around 20%

Holographic computing made possible

Beyond the Frame: The New Classroom

Designing for virtual reality and the impact on education | Alex Faaborg | TEDxCincinnati

My decision to treat VR, in part, as a machine to realize such desires for bodily transcendence2 is not intended to promote any particular metaphysics, though I do believe that many current materialist analyses of the technology miss the mark in failing to address the implicit importance of metaphysics to virtual consumers. Although military advantage, followed closely by global financial and data services, drives VR’s invention, appeals to metaphysics, however subtle, remain important in promoting the technology Such appeals would fail if they did not tap a pervasive cultural longing. Key VR inventors themselves evince various aspects of this yearning—often cloaked in a belief in progress. Eric Sheppard (1993,4,12) argues that information technologies are composed not only of machinery but also of the institutional and intellectual infrastructures that invent, deliver, and package them. What follows tries to keep Sheppard’s caveat in mind. I offer a necessarily selective and critical review. Broadly speaking, I am interested in the ontology of representation, but I am also arguing that the form of a technology relates directly to perception — always culturally inflected, but only partially so—and to how ontology is discursively positioned. This precludes extensive discussion of every electronic technology (for example, TV), though I do address pretwentieth-century technologies that influence the forms of both TV and VR. Finally, I agree with David Depew (1985) that history is criticism. A narrative history of VR is somewhat ironic given the technology’s tendency to foreclose narrative/time in favor of spectacle/space, a consideration taken up in this chapter’s discussion of science fiction.

As VR creator Anna Henson—associate producer of Styles and Customs of the 2020s—explained in an email, “the museum is responsible for an interaction in which two people’s physical space will intersect. This is, in fact, a very intimate interaction.” Moments of intimacy range from introducing a visitor to VR by pantomiming how to put on the headset, asking for permission to tighten the strap against a visitor’s head, or being the first person a visitor sees when a session is cut short due to in nausea or dizziness. The museum took care to select and train gallery ambassadors who would be sensitive to visitors’ vulnerability. Henson also included a monitor that allowed bystanders to gain a glimpse into what their plugged-in companions were seeing, an effort to create a more inclusive and social experience.

Virtual Reality isn't anything new but its use in the law courts system isn't mainstream...yet

In addition to putting the next wave of visual technology to work on the big screen, Disney and Lucasfilm, the division that produces Star Wars, are also hard at work developing virtual reality and augmented reality products that can let the film's fans feel like they're inside the world of the movies, even if they're at home (or, maybe, at a Disney theme park).

One obvious possibility would be providing first-hand virtual experiences for students; for example, allowing teachers in training to observe classrooms virtually, giving environmentalists a virtual view of the devastation of forested regions, or letting sociology students experience human and social poverty around the world.

As educational theorist John Dewey established long ago, effective learning is experiential (Dewey, 1938) — and VR provides a direct method by which that can be realized.

Virtual reality offers enormous potential for journalism.

In many ways, it’s precisely this union of science and magic that needs to be bottled and tirelessly cultivated if VR is to win the favor of mass audiences.

A new virtual reality app aims to make this learning process much easier and even fun.

When we first got Google’s virtual reality headset at my house, called the Google Daydream, I can’t say I was too excited.

Social Out, VR In: We Analyzed Thousands Of Early-Stage Startup Descriptions To See Where Tech Is Headed Next

One major example of gender differences in VR is that women are far more susceptible to VR-induced nausea.

Perceptual Learning - Training the brain to better perceive the information it is getting from the eyes.

Developwith OSVR

Pixar Animation co-founder Ed Catmull has warned that virtual reality technology may not be the revolution in storytelling that some of its evangelists have claimed. “It’s not storytelling. People have been trying to do [virtual reality] storytelling for 40 years. They haven’t succeeded. Why is that? Because we know that if they succeed then people would jump on it.”

Removing the VR goggles, the adrenaline continues to course through me. I have only been inside the Project Syria immersive for a few minutes, but the effect is dramatic. It was commissioned for the 2014 World Economic Forum in Davos to give politicians an insight into everyday life in Syria. And it works.

"You will have a pair of sunglasses, and you can switch it from glasses mode, to VR mode as you wish. The VR will expand to fill your field of vision, or you can watch it in a little window.” This device of the future will not only bring virtual reality into our everyday lives, according to Urbach, but also destroy the primary way we use many other electronics. “You’ll be done with any other screen,” he says. “You won’t need it. It will be generated on a surface in the air. Put your finger over your palm, it’s a phone. Your desk becomes a laptop. "The resolution two generations from now will give you a 4K experience, so you probably won’t go to a movie theater. Why would you buy a wall-sized TV?”