How to alter your VR experience

Here’s a question for you! Did you ever visit a virtual reality environment while in different physical spaces and think your virtual experiences were different in each real life place?

Research indicates that you’re not imaging these variations!

Zhang, Yang, Jin, and Li h learned that the real environments in which virtual experiences take place influence those virtual events.

So there’s something to be said to encouraging your kids to take their VR headsets into different spaces (not least to get them out of your hair for half an hour!), taking them outside will be different from experiencing the VR in their bedroom. Experiencing the same VR in a school setting will therefore likely be different to experiencing it in a park.

Junjun Zhang, Xiaoyan Yang, Zhenlan Jin, and Ling Li.  “Distance Estimation in Virtual Reality is Affected By Both the Virtual and the Real-World Environments.”  i-Perception, in press, https://doi.org/10.1177/20416695211023956