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.