Oussama Metatla

Lisa May Thomas, Helen M. Deeks, Alex J. Jones et al.

In most VR experiences, the visual sense dominates other modes of sensory input, encouraging non-visual senses to respond as if the visual were real. The simulated visual world thus becomes a sort of felt actuality, where the 'actual' physical body and environment can 'drop away', opening up possibilities for designing entirely new kinds of experience. Most VR experiences place visual sensory input (of the simulated environment) in the perceptual foreground, and the physical body in the background. In what follows, we discuss methods for resolving the apparent tension which arises from VR's prioritization of visual perception. We specifically aim to understand how somatic techniques encouraging participants to 'attend to their attention' enable them to access more subtle aspects of sensory phenomena in a VR experience, bound neither by rigid definitions of vision-based virtuality nor body-based corporeality. During a series of workshops, we implemented experimental somatic-dance practices to better understand perceptual and imaginative subtleties that arise for participants whilst they are embedded in a multi-person VR framework. Our preliminary observations suggest that somatic methods can be used to design VR experiences which enable (i) a tactile quality or felt sense of phenomena in the virtual environment (VE), (ii) lingering impacts on participant imagination even after the VR headset is taken off, and (iii) an expansion of imaginative potential.

Michael O Connor, Helen M. Deeks, Edward Dawn et al.

We describe a framework for interactive molecular dynamics in a multiuser virtual reality environment, combining rigorous cloud-mounted physical atomistic simulation with commodity virtual reality hardware, which we have made accessible to readers (see isci.itch.io/nsb-imd). It allows users to visualize and sample, with atomic-level precision, the structures and dynamics of complex molecular structures 'on the fly', and to interact with other users in the same virtual environment. A series of controlled studies, wherein participants were tasked with a range of molecular manipulation goals (threading methane through a nanotube, changing helical screw-sense, and tying a protein knot), quantitatively demonstrate that users within the interactive VR environment can complete sophisticated molecular modelling tasks more quickly than they can using conventional interfaces, especially for molecular pathways and structural transitions whose conformational choreographies are intrinsically 3d. This framework should accelerate progress in nanoscale molecular engineering areas such as drug development, synthetic biology, and catalyst design. More broadly, our findings highlight VR's potential in scientific domains where 3d dynamics matter, spanning research and education.