Very Real: Exploring effects of Virtual Reality on the human mind

With a growing number of hours spent in Virtual Reality, questions are being raised on how virtual reality affects the human mind.

Now that the hurdle of motion sickness is being jumped, it has become far easier to spend extended periods within VR. As the price point for immersive VR begins to drop, more users are coming into the market. Are these users in for a life enriching experience, and is it possible that VR is reshaping the human mind?

Users experience a feeling known as “presence” when fully immersed in VR.

Presence is feeling we are really in the virtual world. Our mind and body believe the virtual world is real, at least for a moment. Presence can be experienced in games with the most simple graphics. Our minds don’t seem concerned with things not looking real. So long as our body’s movement syncs up with the virtual space, we begin to feel presence.

The phenomena of presence is a major talking point of VR enthusiasts. When we express our appreciation for VR to a non-user, “presence” is a word we can use to express our amazement with this technology. When sharing the experience of Virtual Reality to those who are skeptical, we can explain to them the feeling of presence.

Presence seems to be a defining moment for many VR users, the moment when they realize “this is going to be huge”.

Presence is a syncing of the mind to the virtual experience.

The human mind is malleable, so the VR experience need not be 1:1 with real life in order to fool a human brain. We can see this in some VR experiences where the distances of objects are slightly further or closer than real life. While in VR the brain adjusts accordingly to compensate for the changes in distances. When users step out of VR, they feel disoriented as their brains re-adjust to the real world.

Our minds are constantly compensating, analyzing, and syncing.

While we are walking, our vision remains clear and smooth as our eyes and brain compensate for the movement. When we glance at obscured objects our brains fill in the gaps, analyzing what we might be looking at. When someone first puts on glasses and their vision is zoomed in or out, the brain resyncs its comprehension of distance, rather quick so we don’t fall on our faces.

Virtual Reality places a human in a space where all of our senses must recalibrate.

Well designed VR experiences allow our minds to sync up to the virtual world unnoticeably. This recalibration and syncing of brain functions has a very real effect on the human mind. Research is being done to better understand what goes on in the human mind when stepping in and out of virtual reality. I will be exploring research in future posts as I learn about the effects of VR on the human mind.

We can already see virtual reality has very real effects on the mind.

A common experience is a strange disconnection with reality for a short period following immersion, 1–6 hours. This has been labeled “inertia” by some users. If this experience takes place after a few hours of immersion, what could the long term effects be?

As VR grows and develops at an ever increasing rate, there are many questions we will need to answer.

As we develop ever more immersive experiences, it is important for us to understand the very real effects VR has on the human mind. We need VR to be a force for good, a medium for artists, a platform for education, and a tool for empathy. What VR becomes is up to us.

I believe virtual reality can be an exponential positive force for humanity. It’s not hard to imagine virtual reality leading humanity down a darker path, a la The Matrix.

I continue to study and learn how virtual reality affects humans, and how we might utilize this knowledge for the betterment of VR and humanity at large.