Tom’s Wordpress Blog

Zvulun Muola guides a small boat through a tropical stream, shifting his weight to help steer the dinghy. It’s seemingly an ordinary activity. Only it’s not.

His legs are partially paralyzed, the boat and stream aren’t really in the tropics, and in fact don’t even exist. They are part of a virtual reality world inside the Chaim Sheba Rehabilitation Hospital near Tel Aviv.

An Associated Press story describes how the hospital uses a new virtual reality system to help those like Muola gain or regain functions they need to move about the non-virtual world. Devices like the virtual dinghy or winding road demand their players (that is, patients) perform well the primitive sensory motor functions that lie at the foundation of many activities — shifting weight, establishing and maintaining balance, coordinating movements of the eye with the body.

The system in Israel is the first of it’s kind to be implemented. There are plans to put them into facilities in Washington, D.C. and Houston, Texas in the next couple of years.

The article didn’t say how much these systems cost, but I’d bet it’s plenty. And I’d guess these virtual reality systems probably aren’t that easy to administer, either.

But the promise of virtual reality in gaining or regaining function is almost certain to become more portable, at least according to an exhibit at the London Science Museum.

The exhibit is not about rehab, but about the history and future of computer-based games. What’s novel about the future-based part of the exhibit is the way the games let people interact with them.

A Puffer Sphere is a big inflatable ball that can display images projected on it. The ball on display is two meters, but futures ones might be 5 times that big.

“It’s about making virtual reality projection technology portable, accessible and robust so it can take a bit of a kicking,” said Mr Collier.

The Active Chair uses a series of pistons to move it in reaction to what’s being displayed on an attached curved screen.

Dubbed a “personal simulator”, the Active Chair has come out of work done to help children with disabilities interact with computer technology and provide feedback about what they are seeing.

To make it really portable, the chair can run off of a USB port, part of any laptop computer.

I think it’s wonderful that these sorts of VR applications are available now and might become more widepread in the near future. But it’s also important to remember that their purpose is a fairly simple one - providing conditions for people to learn or relearn the fundamental building blocks of movement that make up almost all human activity.

I suppose these virtual reality approaches caught my eye because of the Feldenkrais Method that I practice. Though the Feldenkrais Method doesn’t rely on high tech devices, it is ingenious in providing it’s own approach to learning or relearning the fundamentals of human function. And high tech or not, that’s a pretty useful thing.

Life is full of options, different ways to do stuff, think about stuff, feel stuff, sense stuff. But sometimes it’s easy to get stuck in one way of doing things, ignoring the other options that might be available. According to Moshe Feldenkrais, developing enough self awareness to have more than one way of doing things is pretty much a unique human trait. Feldenkrais was mostly working in the domain of movement and self use, but that was his teaching ground. The idea of developing options extends across human function. Now reinforcement of those ideas come from what I’d consider an unlikely source, artificial intelligence guru Marvin Minsky. Here’s some of his thinking from a Boston Globe interview about his new book:

My view is that the reason we’re so good at things is not that we have the best way but because we have so many ways, so when any one of them fails, you can switch to another way of thinking. So instead of thinking of the mind as basically a rational process which is distorted by emotion, or colored and made more exciting by emotion — that’s the conventional view — emotions themselves are different ways to think.

and;

The theme of the book is really resourcefulness and why are people so much better at controlling the world than animals are? The argument is: because they have far more different ways to think than any competitor.

Minsky’s more controversial view is that machines can have emotions, but we will probably need to read the book to get into that. But he does have an interesting idea on why we would want to do that.

Soon the world will face a shortage of labor as people live longer and have fewer children. Our standards of living will sharply decline unless we can manage to make machines that have the common-sense human abilities that our industries will need. Also, if we succeed at this, we’ll develop new ideas about what happens inside our own minds — and this should show us ways to improve some of our own ancient ways to think, as well as to enhance and extend the abilities of the machines we make.

Feldenkrais would probably have wanted to get his hands on a copy of Minsky’s book.

Remember the fable of the fable of the grasshopper and the ant? While the ant worked hard to store away food for the coming winter, the grasshopper fiddled around as he liked. But when winter came, the ant ate while the grasshopper starved. This teaches us that work is better than play, right?

Well maybe.It depends when you ask.

According to a study done at Columbia University, we’re likely to regret goofing off in the sort term, but actually prefer it in the long term. The study asked participants a week after some work or play situation if they had any regrets. The worker ants had little regret, while the loafer grasshoppers did. But when asked about such decisions they had made 5 years ago, it was a different story.

And when going way back, a group who graduated 40 years ago were even more favorable to the leisure decisions.

The study’s designer points out this isn’t a license to goof off all the time. After all, the graduates interviewed had done enough work to graduate. And the poor grasshopper wasn’t around to comment. Still, it’s good to know how to balance work and downtime.

Memories can be tricky little devils, in the sense that they are not always as accurate as we’d like. And much has been studied and written about downright false memories. Now the false memory idea even seems to extend into virtual reality. An experiment at the University of Washington suggests that false memories arose in students who were asked to learn to use a virtual digital camera.

This seemed interesting to me at first. I began wondering if the idea of sensory appreciation in virtual environments could become unreliable -we’re not actually doing what we think we’re doing - and that contribute to the deluded memories. But as I read more, I began to wonder about the experiment itself. It seems “real experiences” weren’t included here. And commenters to the post pointed out questions about the methods used and findings reported.

Still, I’d curious about enough about stuff like false memories and sensory appreciation to not write off the subject.

Sometime in the future, VR training will offer economic and effectiveness advantages that will make probably make it attractive to organizations and institutions who need to train large numbers of people. False memories or even just wrong ideas in VRees would be a a real shortcoming: it could be costly or at the least cause unnecessary mistakes, and in some cases be dangerous.

I don’t know whether things like unreliable sensory appreciation are a factor here, but I’d sure want to find it before investing a lot into the technology.