How does VR influence your brain?

What is actually happening in your brain when you wear that bulky box on your head?

Understanding Sensation and Perception

Just stop for a second, and see what all senses are working together for you to read this exact letter. Eyes take care of the reading part, if you are reading out loud, ears also make a cameo.

So in any scenario, one or multiple sensory organs work together to bring in the information to the brain. This process is sensation.

The different ways our body has of bringing us information about the world around us (for example, vision, hearing, touch, and taste), and the act of sending that information to our brain to perceive.

What happens next is that the brain interprets this information, allowing us to understand what is happening in the environment. Brain trying to understand what is happening from the sensory information it receives is known as Perception,

For instance, we can see a dog running across the room, hear her bark, and feel her fur brush against our skin — these are sensations that we come to understand and perceive as experiences. The sensations all come together through perception to give us the experience of the dog. It is this interplay of sensation (using vision, hearing, etc.) and perception (our brain’s interpretation of this information) that creates our experience of reality.

So what happens in VR?

So one of the important concepts in VR is Presence!

Presence is simply put, is a measure of how much a person feels “real” in the virtual world.

More the presence you feel more you are immersed in the world.

When we are actually in the Virtual Reality experience, each element in the experience, the visuals, the music, the touch feedback, all of these are sending signals to the brain through sensory organs.

In the brain, this information is received and tried to make sense of.

Even though deep inside we might know we are in VR experience and none of the experience around us is real, the brain can not accept that fact cause sensory organs are telling a different story.

So it is very important to design each element carefully that allows manipulating the sensory organs into believing it is really out there.

If it is not designed properly, the user will feel get mixed signals from the system and senses that lead to disorientation and discomfort.

Whenever designing an experience make sure you are able to achieve “presence” through it.