Digital nose good news for virtual reality

The videos are easy to find on the Internet: Someone slips an Oculus Rift mask over his or her eyes, only to collapse to the floor minutes later.

Behind the mask, a virtual roller coaster reaches its peak and then quickly dips down a steep track, disorienting the user completely.

David Whittinghill, a professor of computer graphics technology at Purdue University, said such reactions are common with the Oculus — the latest innovation in virtual reality — because what's so convincingly happening to the brain isn't actually happening to the body.

Whittinghill and a group of undergraduate researchers set out to reduce "simulator sickness" — the result of the dissonance between the mind and the body — and found the solution was literally right in front of their faces.

"The nose is an important part of visual perception. It's always there, and when you go into these headsets, it obscures the view of your nose, so it takes away something you're accustomed to perceiving," he said. "Even if it's not a conscious perceiving, you're used to it."

For a senior capstone project last year, Whittinghill's team studied the problem and discovered fixed points of reference — such as a dashboard or cockpit — significantly reduced the symptoms of simulator sickness, which closely resembles motion or sea sickness, he said.

"How could we transplant this to other experiences and what could we put in as a frame of reference that wouldn't take up too much space?" he said. "We basically brainstormed a lot of things and read a lot of papers and came up with the virtual nose."

That's right: A student suggested inserting the image of a nose in the center of the game display. After testing 41 subjects, they found it reduced simulator sickness by about 15 percent. During a game development conference in California last month, Whittinghill presented the team's research.

"The big surprise was that nobody noticed it. That we did not expect at all," he said. "We thought it would be something people would tolerate and learn to tune it out, but in fact they didn't even perceive it."

Much like the real thing, the virtual nose was overlooked but offered a valuable point of reference, that contributes to the body's complex system of perception more than many realize, he said.

"When we told them there was a big honking nose in the view port, some of them didn't believe us," he said.

The sickness associated with virtual reality has held the industry back from truly blossoming, said Whittinghill, who is in the process of publishing an academic paper on the research and licensing the idea, which could then be sold to a virtual reality company.

"If we can get with our work an extra 15 percent reduction … for just putting a nose in that nobody is aware of anyway, that's a no-brainer," he said. "You've got to hit it from so many different dimensions. It's a really complex perceptual system. Anything you can throw at it to reduce the symptoms, you probably should."