Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab shows your virtual future

Stanford University’s lately restored Virtual Human Interaction Lab is open for public to let them have an awe-inspiring virtual reality experience. If you really wish to see how your living room will look like in some years, go and take a tour of the virtual reality lab at Stanford. Jeremy Bailenson, an associate professor of communication and his students have set up a high-tech virtual reality lab for you in the university.

Standford Virtual Human Interaction Lab

The lab is a sophisticated multisensory room, where the experimental individuals are supposed to wear a helmet-like accessory. The head-mounted device sports two small screens close to each eye. These 1280x1024- resolution screens imitate stereoscopic vision and bring the illusion of virtual reality to the experimental objects. The room is arranged with advanced ambisonic sound system that encompasses 22 speakers, which are hidden in the wall.

There are some high powerful speakers even underneath the floor. These high-tech speakers can vibrate the floor, which is crafted with aeronautical grade steel. Well, the person standing on the floor will feel acute vibration, which will also add to the virtual reality experience. Certainly, the combination of sensitive movements of sound across the room and the floor vibration feels the person as the sound is coming from visual location of virtual objects, says Bailenson.

In addition, the Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, or CAVE room, has two massive commercial 65-inch 3DTVs. The displays located in a corner elevate a kind of illusion in the experimental individual as if s/he is walking through the space. In the meantime, cameras on the wall monitor positions of the infrared lights on the 3D glasses of the experimental object to help the system update virtual scenes.

Bailenson and his team of researchers have been working on this revolutionary virtual reality project for several years. He founded the lab at Stanford in 2003 in company of an undergrad programmer and a PhD student. As of now, the renovated lab has 10 graduate students, over 20 undergrads besides a permanent lab manager. Mr. Bailenson dreams to leverage the resources of the lab to do good for the everyday citizens and society.

The virtual reality research in the lab mainly focuses on education and to nurture pro-environmental and energy education behavior among people. For the purpose, Bailenson demonstrates the experimental individuals the repercussions of cutting trees through the virtual reality technique. In some experiments, the virtual reality lab shows a person the aftereffects of spending long hours in front of computer with video games and others. Bailenson says,

A lot of our studies now are geared toward putting people, everyday citizens, in situations that they wouldn't be in otherwise. We are embracing virtual reality as a way of letting people understand their impact on the environment with the goal of them actually changing that behavior.