Modeling Reality With Virtual Worlds

Virtual reality has been alive for some time in the form of MMRPGs, which go all the way back to the late 90s and early 2000. As a child, I played Runscape, a medieval role playing game with hundred of thousands of other players. It was new and fun, and never ending: there was always places to explore and new people to meet. It's been a few years since I last played that, but the virtual reality genre has certainly not stopped growing.

People use MMRPGs/Virtual Reality for a multitude of things. Some want to experience something different, some want to be someone different entirely. Others want a second shot at 'life' - a chance to do the things you might not be able to do in the real world. They might do it to escape their normal lives, meet new people, or just pass the time. But virtual reality is just that: virtual - not real. A set of 1's and 0's, a file folder, an arrangement of pixels on a screen. There are some who get so entrenched into the game that they forget this and will spend thousands on virtual and intangible items. Because of their popularity, VR is "fueling a robust economy driven mostly by avatar-to-avatar transactions estimated at between $1 billion and $2 billion a year in real dollars" (NYT). With numbers like that, it's hard to ignore the pull of VR.

But there are uses for VR that are new and ground breaking in their own right. Duke University researchers have been experimenting with VR and paralyzed patients. They've found that by putting people who are unable to walk into a exoskeleton like suit and equipping them with a VR headset 'tricks' their brains into thinking they are walking. "The device used is called Brain-Machine Interface, a computer system that records brain signals from human thoughts. The computer translates the recordings into commands to output devices. Patients had to imagine themselves making lower limb movements and then electrical signals from the brain were translated to the computer and moved each patients' avatar on the virtual reality screen." Everything was simulated, all the way down to the 'thud' of taking a footstep, which was simulated as an electrical pulse to the patients upper body. Over time, the patients reported gaining feeling and being able able to move certain parts of their body!

(Note: The article about VR helping peopel regain feeling and movement was not on the reading list, but was instead discovered during my own initial research. It can be found here.)