The Neuroscience of Virtual Reality | NeuroLogica Blog
The visual part of VR is now above the waterline – it is good enough to convince your brain that it is real. Incremental advances will be nice, but the technology has arrived. What VR developers are working on now are the other senses. Haptic feedback means giving sensory feedback to match what the person sees. So if you touch a virtual object, the haptic glove you are wearing gives the sensation of touch to match. Others are working on ways to fool the vestibular system to sense the movement you are seeing. This would fix the motion sickness problem, but it remains to be seen if they will succeed. One company, for example, is working on a system in which you control your movement by moving your head and body. Tilt your head forward to move forward. I will be interested to see how well this works. The bottom line of all this is that – our brains construct our experience of reality, and it is possible to hack that construction to fool the brain into believing that you are operating in a virtual reality. The experience, as primitive as it is, is already profound, and will only get more so.