Crowdsourcing VR research

If 2016 has been a golden year for virtual reality, there is reason to believe that the coming year may be even better. According to a recent market forecast byInternational Data Corporation (IDC), worldwide revenues for the augmented reality and virtual reality market are projected to grow from $5.2 billion in 2016 to more than $162 billion in 2020.With virtual reality becoming a mass product, it becomes crucial to understand its psychological effects on users.Over the last decade, a growing body of research has been addressing the positive and negative implications of virtual experience for the human mind. Yet many questions still remain unanswered.Some of these issues are concerned with the defining features of virtual experience, i.e., what it means to be “present” in a computer-simulated reality. Other questions regard the drawbacks of virtual environments, such as cybersickness, addiction and other psychological disorders caused by prolonged exposure to immersive virtual worlds.For example,in a recent article appeared in The Atlantic, Rebecca Searles wrote that after exploring a virtual environment, some users have reported a feeling of detachment that can last days or even weeks. This effect had beenalready documented by Frederick Aardema and colleagues in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking some years ago. The team administered a nonclinical sample questionnaires to measures dissociation, sense of presence, and immersion before and after a...
Source: Positive Technology Journal - Category: Information Technology Tags: Research tools Telepresence & virtual presence Virtual worlds Source Type: blogs