AR

Immersive virtual reality

Since commercial virtual reality (VR) systems such as the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive have become very affordable, there's been a huge increase in VR applications for entertainment, training, and science.

The real power of VR from the perspective of science is that it can place our sensory modalities in conflict with one another - an object can feel large, yet appear to be small. From the perspective of understanding how we combine our senses to experience the world and guide our actions, this technique is hugely powerful and opens lots of new research avenues.

On the flip side of the VR coin, despite the large range of more serious contexts that VR is starting to be utilized in (e.g., training in the nuclear industry, surgical learning, elite sport training), we know very little about how using a VR headset affects the fundamentals of our hand-eye coordination. This leaves a huge opportunity to re-create well-understood lab paradigms in a virtual world to see what is broken at what is working as it should be

Key paper

Buckingham. G. (in press). Examining the size-weight illusion with visuo-haptic conflict in immersive virtual reality. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. [DATA & PREPRINT]