Doped up on Dopamine

Why is playing with balloons so much fun? Because physics interactions make you feel like you can predict the (nearby) future. Nailing a target gives you that awesome rush of pleasure because you planned it, anticipated it, and executed [2].

Reinforcement Learning Loop

Learning how to throw a ball into basket requires an incredible amount of processing, but our brains become good at it through Reinforcement Learning. Playing off of the Anticipation and Reward of nailing a target, your Dopamine System is heavily invovled in facilitating learning.

What does this all mean?

Looking at this baby, she’s implicitly learning learning about the causality of pushing, pulling, and inertia just by playing.

We’ve all been there

There’s something fundamental in our nature to play with our surroundings, and to become better at prediciting the results of our actions!

Never before VR have we had this much freedom to explore and interact, and spend a significant amount of time learning new physics properties of a world!

Takeaway

As developers, we must work with this huge sense of Agency, and encourage people to learn the physics by playing with it. Giving the ability for a user to get better at doing something physical can encourage them to keep playing and exploring your world.

Mess with the gravity sittings, make people super human if you want, and somewhat violate their initial expectations, and you might see an incredible engagement rate.

Keep exploring my fellow VR innovators, and tune into my podcast to learn more: ResearchVR Podcast Newest episode: User Interface and Interactions

References:

Az Balabanian is an aerial cinematographer, cognitive scientist and designer specializing in HCI and VR Research. You can follow him on Twitter. If you are interested in publishing your article on Haptical, here is how you can do it.

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