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How Virtual Reality Goggles Contributed to my Journey to Physical Rehabilitation

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IYou were asking me a month or two ago if I had ever had a spatially immersive experience, or if I was 60 years old and could have been hired early. Virtual Reality Goggles, I’d say it was as likely as the Silicon Valley tech giant appointed to “disrupt” the US federal government.

Let me explain a series of events that are likely to have led me to the latest technology.

Over the years I had to be in the perfect acrobatic position that would qualify me Cirque du Soleil To avoid discomfort while working on my computer. Despite moving to multiple rounds of standing desk and boring physics, I can no longer use my right arm.

Last year in particular felt like a tortured battle between cognitive decline and brain fog. This is the result of the steady use of ineffective anti-inflammatory agents. I have never done much work in my life and never had much time in my hands. I am currently armed with an MRI scan indicating that my shoulder tendon has ruptured. This records the date to combat the three herniated neck discs compressing the nerves running through my arm, and my malicious guilt.

To cope, I have learned to develop curiosity, a great source of distraction. I leave the house and open to places where adventures may take me… because you never know. Last week I did a shuffle dance with a great DJ Camden assembly Pub in the afternoon.

Two months ago I left for something I thought I would stop by at the museum, but instead found myself in a store looking for a charger for my iPhone. While standing there, I explained to my empathetic young sales assistant that I was a benched writer and that my right arm was temporarily disabled, and jokingly asked if he had a gadget that could put food in my mouth with my left hand without stabbing my eyes with a fork.

I looked ignorant when he asked if he wanted to try out the “mixed reality headset.” He explained that it is used in multimedia experiences such as watching movies and games on virtual screens. He suggested that eye tracking, coupled with voice control in the accessibility feature, could make me work.

The next moment I was sitting in the demonstration area wearing thick, heavy glass goggles. After a quick setup, a little green dot floats in the air. Tap your thumb and finger together to see a group of familiar app icons in a transparent visual overlay. Pixelization of the graphics makes the icon more clear than the chair in front of me. Eye tracking is the most surprising thing. All you need to do is look at the app you want to launch, gently tap your finger and thumb together to open the program. You can move multiple screens close or far apart, like furniture in a room.

I try other programs, open the photos and extend them to isologies. I’m watching immersive videos that look just as realistic as nightmares with dinosaurs blown away, but they’re kind of adorable and check me out the same way I keep the gaps in them. It reminds me of a parenting moment when my son was a toddler and struggled to resolve whether the stuffed animal was real or not. He was relieved to be told there was no gruffalo-like thing, despite being a replica of a stuffed animal. Once he realized it was an optical trick, he didn’t need to ask again the difference between the real thing and the pretend.

Navigating my path around various programs is a bit like learning to balance on a bike. I grow up confused. Speed ​​of movement requires constant adaptation to spatial and visual cues. I start to relax. I reach out and interact with digital objects – butterflies land on my finger. I have found myself reacting to the same wonders I experience in the real world.

And de Noument. A small dial appears on the side of the goggles, allowing you to control the reality you want to immerse yourself in. The actual room is gone and surrounded by mountain scenes. I breathe in surprise. Its spatial depth, light and shadow make the scene very clear and I feel the space around me. I know it’s not real, but the distinction is clear – I experience a mood shift as if it were. It’s similar to getting into a Piccadilly Circus tube and surface at the next stop and being on the beach in the Bahamas.

If the possibilities of these immersive spaces are slightly frightening, consider the historical adaptation of neurocognition and spatial awareness as a species, as well as the consequences of cultural and scientific advances. It takes how physics evolved because we were able to imagine visual art, the fundamental shift in spatial perspectives from two dimensions to three dimensions of painting, or the invisible behavior of the universe that is not available to the human eye.

In a few minutes, I was easily in and out of the program. Using my eyes and hands, my arms relaxed without firing nerve pain. It shows software that demonstrates breakthroughs in medical training, an immersive experience that can be used in educational environments, art, architecture and design. Seeing this, I realized I was overwhelmed by tears thinking that I might be able to work for the months leading up to my surgery and during rehabilitation.

Until my thoughts move to my next dilemma. How did you intend to break the news to your husband? 30 years of marriage and rules have always been the case. We are consulting each other about purchasing over £100. How was it when you explained it to him over the phone? What is the difference in my mood, the vision I had the following year in my life? It felt like someone had given me a smart medicine, a magical cure for brain fog. In fact, I always change goggles and painkillers.

There was only one answer. I have to bring them home so he can try it out for himself. I took a picture of the boxless purchase and texted him with the message “No heart attacks, I can return them.” He immediately texts, “I’m having a heart attack.” I leave the store with deep creative thinking and new virtual reality goggles, carrying the bag with my left arm. I take the bus that goes in the wrong direction and go without picking up a visual clue that will stop another 10.

Once I send it home, negotiations will continue all night. I’ll refrain from reviewing. He admits there is a consensus that it is relatively best on a VR headset, but that’s it. virtual reality. I think it’s like claiming that smartphones are nothing more than mobile phones. He points out that even influencers and early adopters are predicting market failures because prices are so prohibitively prohibitive (from £3,499). Why don’t you wait for prices to drop? Point out that waiting will defeat your purpose. It’s about doing my job and helping me survive mentally next year. He’s certain. He gets it and is actually at ease for me. Even it moved. The goggles stay.

A few days later During coaching on accessibility features, you can block gestures from your right arm and force a break in the part of your brain you want to steer on the right side. Accelerate your learning to become hands-free on other devices. And that’s good because I can only use my goggles for a few hours a day before I have a neck cramp with weight. But I learned to hack for that. By lying down to serve as a table of some kind.

I’m not dying with bug eyes in public, but after experiencing the panic attacks I experienced after taking them off, I am beginning to feel relieved with my new hip identity – the consequences of physical disorientation and fear towards their seductive charm.

This turned my way from friends and family despite the enormous amount of ridiculous laughter and skeptical concerns. I have not been a target of this much stack since being arrested after trying joints as a teenager. Am I at risk of letting go of my struggle to become a human in the real world? Look at this space. This article was described as hands-free.

Debora Harding’s dance with Toctopus has been published by Profile Books and Bloomsbury USA. Buy for £9.99 Guardianbookshop.com

Source: www.theguardian.com

Miniature VR goggles revolutionizing brain research

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This diagram shows a VR setup with an “overhead threat” projected into the top field of view.Credit: Dom Pinke/Northwestern University
For the first time, the goggles allow researchers to study responses to overhead threats. northwestern university
Researchers have developed a new virtual reality (VR) goggle for mice. These tiny goggles aren’t just cute, they offer a more immersive experience for lab mice. By more faithfully simulating natural environments, researchers can more accurately and precisely study the neural circuits underlying behavior. A leap forward in VR goggles The new goggles represent a breakthrough compared to current state-of-the-art systems that simply surround a mouse with a computer or projection screen. Current systems allow the mouse to see the laboratory environment peeking out from behind the screen, but the flat nature of the screen prevents it from conveying three-dimensional (3D) depth. Another drawback was that the researchers couldn’t easily attach a screen above the mice’s heads to simulate overhead threats, such as looming birds of prey. New VR goggles avoid all of these problems. And as VR grows in popularity, the goggles could also help researchers gain new insights into how the human brain adapts and responds to repeated VR exposure. . This area is currently poorly understood. The study was published in the journal Dec. 8. neuron. This is the first time researchers have used a VR system to simulate overhead threats. A view through new miniature VR goggles.Credit: Dom Pinke/Northwestern University “For the past 15 years, we’ve been using VR systems on mice,” said Daniel Dombeck of Northwestern University, lead author of the study. “Traditionally, labs have used large computers and projection screens to surround the animals. For humans, this is like watching TV in the living room. You can still see the couch and walls. You There are cues around it that let you know you’re not in the scene. Next, consider wearing VR goggles, like the Oculus Rift, that occupy your entire field of vision, except the projected scene. They can’t see anything, and each eye projects a different scene to create depth information, which the rats lacked.” Dombeck is a professor of neurobiology in Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. His laboratory is a leader in the development of his VR-based systems and high-resolution laser-based imaging systems for animal research. The value of VR Although researchers can observe animals in nature, it is extremely difficult to image patterns of brain activity in real time while animals interact with the real world. To overcome this challenge, the researchers integrated his VR into a laboratory setting. In these experimental settings, animals use a treadmill to move through a scene, such as a virtual maze, projected onto a screen around them. By keeping the mouse in place on a treadmill, rather than running it through a natural environment or a physical maze, neurobiologists can use tools to The brain can be observed and mapped. Ultimately, this will help researchers understand the general principles of how neural circuits activated during different behaviors encode information. “VR essentially recreates a real-life environment,” Dombeck says. “While we’ve had a lot of success with this VR system, the animals may not be as immersed as they would be in a real environment. Force the mouse to pay attention to the screen and ignore the surrounding lab.” That alone requires a lot of training.” Introduction to iMRSIV Recent advances in hardware miniaturization led Dombeck and his team to wonder if they could develop VR goggles that more closely replicate real-world environments. We created compact goggles using custom-designed lenses and a small organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display. The system, called Miniature Rodent Stereo Illumination VR (iMRSIV), consists of two lenses and two screens, one on each side of the head, that illuminate each eye individually for 3D vision. This provides each eye with a 180-degree field of view that fully immerses the mouse and excludes the surrounding environment. An artist’s interpretation of a cartoon of a mouse wearing VR goggles. Credit: @rita
Unlike VR goggles for humans, the iMRSIV (pronounced “immersive”) system does not wrap around the mouse’s head. Instead, the goggles are attached to experimental equipment and sit snugly right in front of the mouse’s face. Since the mouse runs in place on the treadmill, the goggles still cover the mouse’s field of view.
“We designed and built a custom holder for the goggles,” said John Issa, a postdoctoral fellow in Dombeck’s lab and co-first author of the study. “The entire optical display, the screen and lens, goes all the way around the mouse.” Enhance learning and engagement By mapping the brains of mice, Dombeck and his team found that the brains of mice wearing goggles activated in a manner very similar to that of freely moving animals. And in a side-by-side comparison, the researchers found that mice with goggles were able to immerse themselves in the scene much faster than mice with traditional VR systems. “We went through the same kind of training paradigm that we’ve done in the past, but the mice with the goggles learned faster,” Dombeck said. “After the first session they were already able to complete the task. They knew where to run and were looking for the right place to get the reward. We think they may not actually need as much training because they can interact with their environment in such a way.” Simulating overhead threats for the first time Next, the researchers used goggles to simulate overhead threats. This was not possible with the current system. Since the hardware for the imaging technology is already on top of the mouse, there is no place to attach a computer screen. But the skies above rats are often where animals are searching for important, sometimes life-or-death information. “The upper part of the visual field in mice is very sensitive to detecting predators from above, like in birds,” said co-first author Dom Pinke, a research specialist in Dombeck’s lab. . “It’s not a learned behavior. It’s an imprinted behavior. It’s hardwired into the mouse’s brain.” To create the looming threat, the researchers projected a dark, expanding disk onto the top of the goggles and above the mouse’s field of view. In experiments, mice ran faster and froze up when they noticed the disc. Both behaviors are common responses to overhead threats. Researchers were able to record neural activity to study these responses in detail. “In the future, we would like to investigate situations in which rats are predators rather than prey,” Issa said. “For example, we can observe brain activity while chasing a fly. This activity involves a lot of depth perception and distance estimation. Those are things we can start to capture. is.” Accessibility in neurobiological research Dombeck hopes the goggles will not only open the door to further research, but also to new researchers. He believes the goggles could make neurobiology research more accessible because they are relatively inexpensive and require less intensive laboratory preparation. “Traditional VR systems are very complex,” Dombeck says. “It’s expensive and it’s big. You need a large lab with plenty of space. Additionally, the long time it takes to train a mouse to perform a task limits the number of experiments you can perform. Although we are still working on improvements, our goggles are small, relatively inexpensive, and also very easy to use. This could make VR technology available to other labs. There is a gender.” References: “Full-field virtual reality goggles for mice” by Domonkos Pinke, John B. Issa, Gabriel A. Dara, Gergely Dobos, Daniel A. Dombeck, December 8, 2023. neuron.DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2023.11.019 This research “Full-field virtual reality goggles for mice” National Institutes of Health (Award Number R01-MH101297), the National Science Foundation (Award Number ECCS-1835389), the Hartwell Foundation, and the Brain and Behavioral Research Foundation. (function(d, s, id){
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Source: scitechdaily.com

Researchers Develop VR Goggles for Mice

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Scenarios Mouse might see when wearing virtual reality goggles

Dom Pinke

Tiny virtual reality goggles for mice create a convincing world in which scientists can study animal brain activity in a variety of scenarios. This technology brings rodent neuroscience even closer to simulations that are indistinguishable from the real world, researchers say.

For about 20 years, Daniel Dombeck Researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois used rudimentary virtual reality to learn more about how the mouse brain works.

The machines used to observe brain patterns are too large to attach to freely moving mice. Instead, the researchers kept a mouse inside such a machine and placed a screen around the mouse that displayed a virtual reality world when it was placed on a treadmill. The researchers were able to create a virtual world where the mouse could navigate any environment they designed.

“We can run them through a virtual maze and image their brains to see which neurons form memories and remember where they are,” Dombeck says. “[But] What the animal sees is a flat surface, there is no depth perception, and the mouse sees things that are not part of the projection. So there’s a collision of all these cues around us, and we think they’re not fully engaged and immersed in the environment. They are not completely fooled.”

To solve this problem, researchers have now created tiny goggles with a different screen for each eye to cut out everything but the virtual world from the mouse’s field of view and create convincing depth perception. They believe this allows them to perform more accurate experiments because the mice become more convinced of the illusion and behave more naturally.

But designing goggles for mice isn’t as simple as simply miniaturizing technology made for humans. A human’s field of view is just over 200 degrees, while a mouse’s field of view is up to 320 degrees.

This means that the screen inside the goggles needs to be curved and almost surround the eyeball. Although the screen can only display 400 pixels by 400 pixels, Dombeck says that’s enough to be convincing, since mouse vision is much less detailed than human vision.

“The first use of goggles on the first set of mice was quite remarkable,” says Dombeck. “The rats seemed to engage very quickly. When you put the goggles on, it’s pitch black and you can’t see anything, and the virtual rendering turns on. The first rat sat up and said, ‘Oh, what is this?’ It was that kind of feeling. It then started moving pretty naturally, which doesn’t usually happen with flat projection screens.”

Dombeck says the long-term goal is to make mouse technology comparable to what’s seen in mice, with additional devices to trick the senses of smell, hearing, and touch.

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Source: www.newscientist.com