The elevator music as you ascend is bland and calming, but when the doors open, your heart begins to churn; slowly at first, then gathering pace. There’s no floor awaiting you, just a wooden plank extending out from the building into a hazy day—80 storeys up.
Walking the plank
—an emotional VR experience
The grain of the wood is a solid presence beneath your feet as you walk unsteadily out into the open air. Sweat prickles your skin. Your heart gallops painfully. And when the disembodied voice gives you the option to step off the plank, your breath becomes a ragged pant as you ready yourself for a precipitous fall onto the street below.
You drift down in a strangely sliding motion instead, ending your taste of bona fide fear in a virtual reality (VR) experience used by School of Psychology researchers Dr Gina Grimshaw, Dr Matt Crawford, and Christopher Maymon.
“With this technology, we can address important psychological questions, such as what drives emotional responses? Where do they come from? And how do people control their attention in emotional states?” says Gina, who is deputy head of the School.
“We’ve demonstrated we can create robust, authentic, emotional experiences in VR that are also safe. So now we can study emotional states in their natural form, not in an artificial laboratory setting.”
“The applications of VR for all areas of psychology are huge—there are so many things you can do with this technology.”
The group is focused fundamentally on understanding minds and how they work, but their research has real-world applications. One ongoing project is looking at different strategies people use to regulate their emotions, and then testing them in the VR environment. As a therapeutic approach, this could provide important benefits for people with anxiety, or those suffering panic attacks, in managing their emotional wellbeing.
“The applications of VR for all areas of psychology are huge—there are so many things you can do with this technology,” says Gina.
The group’s work is at the forefront of a rapidly growing area of research.
“We’re definitely some of the first people to be using VR to better understand emotions,” says Christopher, a postdoctoral researcher with the team. “We’re also breaking new ground by bringing together graphics and tech experts across the University with psychological scientists who can assess behaviour.”
Using technology with such broad potential opens up the possibility to explore other questions that shed light on the human condition. How do we decide what is real or artificial intelligence in VR social interactions, and how does that change how we act? Can we embarrass ourselves in front of a robot? Can we learn complex physical tasks quicker if we inhabit a virtual body skilled in that field?
The only constraint on the group’s research topics is the limits of their imagination.