Senses working overtime

A man walks into a bar, and is surprised to see a horse serving drinks. He stands there astonished, his jaw dropping. The horse looks up, sees the man and says: 'I know you're surprised to see a horse behind the bar, serving drinks...' The man finds his voice: 'No, it's not that' he says, 'I just never thought the duck would sell the place.' 

Or... alternatively, a man walks into a bar and, seeing a horse serving drinks, he realises he is dreaming. 

Or... in an alternative reality, a man walks into a bar and sees a horse serving drinks, and knows he is in a virtual reality (VR) environment. The 'dream world' he is experiencing inside his head is an artefact of the images being rendered by the visor he is wearing.

We are still a little way off from making such immersive experiences ad interactions available to organisational learning. What about room based systems? The iconic Star Trek holodecks (or the virtual room featured in the movie Disclosure), are probably facilities that won't be seen for several decades. But personal, wearable devices are already here and are being refined. The emergence of personal visor technologies such as Facebook's Oculus Rift, Sony's Project Morpheus and other similar wearables will more likely make the above scenario, or any similarly fantastic context possible.

Perhaps a more salient question is not when VR environments will be available for education and training, but for what they will be used? How costly would it be to develop VR content that supports organisational learning? The answer depends on scalability. If enough employees can be trained using VR headsets, and enough headsets are available for all participants, then virtual reality training will be feasible. The key secret to the success of VR though, is psychological rather than technical. It lies in the propensity of the human mind to quickly adapt to its environment. VR wearables are designed to flood your senses with information. While your ears and eyes are receiving synchronised digitised stimuli, the rest of your body is sensing the real world around you, such as the solid seat, pedals and handlebars of a bycycle. It is this psychological blend of real and virtual that causes the user to believe in the experience.



In other words, if the system is good enough to fool your sense of proprioception (where you sense your body is in a space), then the experience will be credible. Several recent VR reviews mention this phenomenon, as seen for example in this article. Currently, VR technologies that are commercially available are used predominantly to play games. However, it is only a small step up from games playing to games based learning. I believe this is the opportunity for content developers and instructional designers to grasp.

If the VR content is skilfully designed, the wearer of the device will (almost) believe they are experiencing it for real. Almost. Problems persist around rendering speed and resolution, audio quality, latency, content development and human issues such as nausea and equilibrioception problems. Experiences can be... well, clunky. Although progress is being made in addressing these issues, more effort will be required before we see a time when any student can learn by using immersion experiences supported by VR.

Wearable, personal VR systems are on the horizon for learning and development - one day we will see them in everyday use. But this won't happen until the problems, which are mainly technical, have been ironed out and appropriately designed content becomes available.

Photo courtesy of Samsung on Flickr


Senses working overtime by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.