VR Headsets

EDUCAUSE LEARNING INITIATIVE | DECEMBER 2014

Scenario

For many years, Professor Keyes has taught a course on ethics that includes various dilemmas to explore notions of ethics in society. In the classic Trolley Problem, a runaway railcar is bearing down on five people on the train tracks. Students are told to imagine that they can pull a lever to send the railcar along another track where just one person will be killed. What do you do?

Discussions are always heated, with students arguing about the morality of action versus inaction relative to the question of five lives versus one. Responses are usually split between pulling the lever and not, and usually some students say they believe they should pull the lever but don’t think they could actually do it.

This semester, Keyes brings several virtual-reality headsets to class on “runaway train” day. First, the students discuss the dilemma as usual—sitting in class, debating the issues surrounding pulling the lever, and noting each student’s decision about what to do. Then the students take turns with the VR headsets. When they put on the headsets, they see and hear a simulation of the scene. By moving their heads, they can look around at the train car and the people on the tracks. The sound of the approaching railcar gets louder. The sensory inputs provided through the headsets—along with the urgency as the scene unfolds and the railcar nears—put students into the virtual world of the dilemma. By way of a joystick, they choose whether or not to pull the lever.

Some students are visibly affected by the immediacy of the experience. The feeling of being present in that situation is powerful, evoking a visceral reaction among most of the students. The students compare their decisions from the discussion to how they behaved in the simulation, discovering that in quite a few cases, students changed their answers—in both directions. Moving the dilemma from an abstract discussion in a classroom to a vivid, highly realistic virtual experience facilitates new questions about the influence of emotion and the pragmatic aspects of morality. The class talks at length about whether ethics is relative and what it means for someone to respond one way in the discussion but differently in the virtual world.

1 What is it?

Virtual reality (VR) uses visual, auditory, and sometimes other sensory inputs—such as tactile or haptic feedback—to create an immersive, computer-generated environment. These virtual environments can be fictitious, such as the fantasy world of a video game, or digital replicas of real locations, such as a museum or historical site. The goal of VR is to create a user experience of being in that virtual world. VR headsets fully cover users’ eyes and often ears, immersing the user in the digital experience. The headsets also track head movements, heightening the feeling of presence by allowing users to look around the virtual environment and see what they would actually see if they were in that place. Some VR headset systems also incorporate motion-tracking technology, allowing users to interact with virtual objects using their hands. The effect of these sensory inputs working in unison can be extremely powerful, one in which the mind starts to see the virtual as real. An emerging class of consumer-level VR headsets is putting these tools into the hands of more users at lower cost, prompting an upsurge in development, improving the experience, and expanding the range of uses.

2 How does it work?

VR headsets look something like scuba or ski goggles, often with headphones. They block ambient light and sound and present a stereoscopic view of a computer-generated environment. Motion sensors follow the movement of the users’ heads—if they turn to the right, what they see in the virtual environment also turns that direction. In some cases, motion is controlled by the virtual world—one common demo puts users on a virtual roller coaster, which runs through the ups, downs, and loops of the track. In other applications, users can move themselves through a virtual space, either with a joystick or by physically moving their bodies. In one VR application for anatomy, the application shows a 3D representation of the human body; users can rotate the body in virtual space, use various commands to highlight or add and remove layers of the body, and manipulate individual body parts to inspect them and see how they fit together.

3 Who’s doing it?

The most common consumer VR headsets currently are the Oculus Rift and the Sony Morpheus, both of which use dedicated hardware and controllers. At the other end of the spectrum is the Google Cardboard, which is a DIY kit of a piece of cardboard that is folded into a viewer that holds an Android smartphone. Many of the early applications for VR headsets focus on gaming, but developers are beginning to investigate educational uses of the technology. One early adopter, YouVisit, has tailored its complete library of over a thousand virtual college and university campus tours to play on VR headsets. The EUseum is a virtual museum in which viewers can view art from the Dutch Rijksmuseum. The VR headset allows users to explore the museum at their own pace, examining high-resolution versions of real works of art. The Immersive Education Initiative is a collaboration of colleges, universities, research institutes, and companies working to define and develop VR headset standards, refine best practices, and establish communities of support for numerous immersive technologies, including virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality.

4 Why is it significant?

VR headsets provide a remarkable feeling of presence in a virtual world. The result can be overpowering at first, with some users experiencing vertigo. Some contend that if the virtual reality is sufficiently immersive, users no longer feel vertigo but instead have a feeling of telepresence—the sense that you are actually in that world. In this way, VR headsets have the potential to provide compelling learning opportunities within safe and effective simulations. VR offers potential for training in dangerous or risky activities, such as military, firefighting, or peacekeeping initiatives. The existence of a convincing VR environment could spark creativity in students, who might construct their own hardware and then design content or begin with content and then develop hardware.

5 What are the downsides?

As with television, film, and video games, any new immersive technology raises the specter of excessive involvement, which could mean students have fewer opportunities for involvement in the social aspects of learning and less connection with the college community. Budget may also be a consideration, given that creating high-resolution virtual worlds and outfitting an entire class with this technology is a costly proposition. In addition, VR headsets pose accessibility obstacles for users with visual or auditory disabilities. Currently, games and demos are available, but learning simulations for VR headsets are still rare, making it difficult to demonstrate the potential of this technology for academic use. As wearable technology, these devices tend to be clumsy, in part because most of them continue to require wired connections.

6 Where is it going?

Prototype models have produced compelling results, but interaction in the environment is often still limited to using a joystick or gamepad. Haptic gloves and other motion-sensing technology will likely be incorporated in more systems to provide an increasingly immersive experience for VR headsets. Resolution and response times are improving, and headsets may soon be wireless. VR headsets that use mobile devices may provide a less expensive alternative than models that depend on a PC or game controller. Samsung has partnered with Oculus recently to produce the Samsung Gear VR, a lightweight headset into which users can snap a tablet computer. A similar headset, the recently announced Carl Zeiss VR One, is compatible with various iOS or Android smartphones.

7 What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Using headsets to visit undersea environments, desert wastes, the floor of the stock market, or the surface of Mars, students can explore content in a way not possible in the classroom. For those studying music or dance, virtual reality offers the opportunity to watch demonstrations of technique repeatedly from different vantage points to better assimilate the skills on display. Medical students could observe surgery multiple times from optimal viewpoints, with the ability to rewind and reexamine technique. Students in literature could visit Victorian London, while learners in other fields could visit microscopic worlds or travel among the stars. Observing such learning experiences, psychologists and learning specialists may even uncover new data about how humans think, react, and learn within specified environments.

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