UX: human factors (II) sensory perception
The Five (and More) Senses
When designing experience in Virtual Reality it is important to learn how immersion is influenced by the senses:
Hearing
Touch
Sight
Smell
Taste.
Other senses & health adverse effects:
Proprioception
Equilibrioception
article 1 - technical approach: Sensory Perception by Mark Billinghurst
Hearing
The Art of Listening is a documentary film about the journey music takes to reach a listener’s ear, from the intent of an instrument maker and composer, to the producers and engineers who capture and preserve an artist’s voice.
article 2: How 3D audio hacks your brain: a century-old audio technology is making a comeback thanks to VR
Binaural recording systems are unique because they emulate the workings of the human head. If a dog barks by our left ear, it takes a few extra microseconds for the bark to reach the right ear; the sound will also be louder in one ear than the other. In addition, sound waves interact with the physical constitution of the listener — the pinna (or outer ear), the head, and the torso — and the surrounding space, creating listener-specific variations otherwise known as head-related transfer function.
Touch
The effects of negative emotions on sensory perception: fear but not anger decreases tactile sensitivity.
Touch can also influence how humans make decisions. Texture can be associated with abstract concepts, and touching something with a texture can influence the decisions a person makes. Touch consists of several distinct sensations communicated to the brain through specialized neurons in the skin. Part of the touch sense and all attributed to different receptors in the skin are:
Pressure
Temperature
Light touch
Vibration (haptic feedback controllers!)
Pain
Other sensations
Learn more about Touch, skin, mechanical sensors, temperature & chemical sensors:
Sight
article 3: Osmose (1995) is an immersive interactive virtual-reality environment installation with 3D computer graphics and interactive 3D sound, a head-mounted display and real-time motion tracking based on breathing and balance. Osmose is a space for exploring the perceptual interplay between self and world, i.e., a place for facilitating awareness of one's own self as consciousness embodied in enveloping space. Through use of their own breath and balance, immersants are able to journey anywhere within these worlds as well as hover in the ambiguous transition areas in between.
article 4: Bjork - Notget VR video Contains many visual effects. The company Analog used many of their usual tools like Houdini, Maya, 3ds Max, vray, and Zbrush. They also used Unity to create the real-time morphing of Björk’s avatar. As Chandler recalls, he and Niklasson experimented with different model concepts, weird surfaces, and artistic interpretations of the themes. To match Björk's movements, Imaginarium provided them with a motion-capture performance by the artist.
Björk - Original Video 'the gate'Björk - Making of 'the gate'
Smell
FeelReal Sensory Mask (2015): smell-o-vision for Oculus VR.
Shakespeare wrote that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. But if you cannot smell, does the rose lose its sweetness?
article 2: How do we smell?
Smell is central to how we perceive and remember the world and the only sense directly linked to the amygdala, part of the brain closely involved in our feelings, meaning that scents can be particularly evocative of powerful emotional memories. Our sense of smell is essential to our humanity: emotionally, physically, sexually, and socially.
Anosmia is the inability to perceive odor, the loss of the sense of smell. The article The Nose that Never Knows explains the effects of losing the sense of smell and why it can be quite harmful.
Taste
Though Taste is not used often in Virtual Reality, it might be something for your project?
The gustatory sense is usually broken down into the perception of four different tastes: salty, sweet, sour and bitter. There is also a fifth taste, defined as umami or savory. It is a myth that the tongue has specific zones for each flavor. The five tastes can be sensed on all parts of the tongue, although the sides are more sensitive than the middle. About half of the sensory cells in taste buds react to several of the five basic tastes. Taste is sensed in the taste buds. Adults have 2,000 to 4,000 taste buds.
Additional Information
Sensory Systems: The Neuroscience of Our Senses
Extra: the use of Color in VR
The mug is orange, the pretzel is brown. Right? The mug is orange, the pretzel is brown.
Whether what I see is the thing or merely represents a thing, I can’t say for certain. But whether I see my orange coffee mug through the intermediary of my cell phone or just through my eyes as usual, we’ve decided that the image, the mug, and the orangeness have something to do with reality as we live it, despite that a single pixel of orange is the same as a single pixel of brown and a single atom of mug doesn’t really have any color properties at all.
Another subtlety is that the differences in human color perception vary much more than most people realize, even among those with “normal” color vision. My eyes and yours probably think a slightly different frequency is pure green, but the manufacturers of screens can only pick one.
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