Researchers of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne have found that virtual reality (VR) influences children in another way as adults. The recent research is of crucial importance, since little work has been done for each adults and kids on this area.
Interesting statement on VR
As early as 2016, the EPFL graduate Jennifer Miehlbratte made an interesting statement. Miehlbrappe allowed users to regulate drones on their VR by moving their torsos to navigate through plenty of obstacles in a virtual landscape.
“Adults had no problem using easy torso movements to fly through the virtual obstacles, but I noticed that children just couldn't do it,” said Miehlbatte. “Then Silvestro asked me to get to his office.”
At that point, Miehlbrappt was monitored by Silvestro Micera, chairman of the Bertarelli Foundation in Translation Neuroengineering. The couple realized that the VR -Torso -experiment had more and that it could reveal something concerning the development of a baby's nervous system. At that point there was no study within the literature on the effect of VR headsets on children.
In this sense, the team decided to do that over several years and worked with the Italian Institute of Technology. The study included 80 children between 6 and 10 years old, and the outcomes were published last month Scientific reports.
“This study confirms the potential of technology to grasp motor control,” says Micera.
Adults are easily in a position to separate their head movements from their upper body to the pilot, just like the best way they ride a motorbike. This process includes the complex integration of several sensory inputs, comparable to seeing from the inner ear for the balance and the proprioception, which is the flexibility of the body to capture movement, motion and site.
For children, they still develop their coordination of torso and head movement, which immediately distinguishes them from adults. One of the interesting findings on this study is that it’s against the ontogenetic model that has been used for 25 years to explain the event of upper body coordination. This model predicts a transition from a director of rigid control to decoupling the head-torso system, and it showed that posture control is ripe after 8 years.
Miehlbrappt is currently ending a postdoc on the University of Lausanne (Unil).
“The model says that children from the acquisition of 1 12 months to six years of age control their upper body as a complete with strong connections between the trunk, head and weapons. After this age, the kids progressively learn to regulate all joints independently, but use the rigid strategy under difficult conditions,” Miehlbritt continues. “Instead, we’ve found that the younger children try their head and body individually when using a virtual system that’s controlled by body movements while the adults use the rigid strategy.”
Results of the experiments
The experiment carried out by the team included placing a VR head set and a movement sensor for the kid when asked to play two games. In each experiments, the kids showed similar control skills to adults when using their head. However, they may not sustain with adults when it got here to checking their upper body.
The children were first asked to align their heads and upper body with a line in numerous orientations inside a virtual landscape. At the identical time, the alignment error and the pinnacle gate coordination were measured. The experiment showed that children can easily control the pinnacle control. Whenever they were asked to align their upper body on the virtual line, the youngest children overestimated their movements and tried to compensate for the heads.
In the second game, the kids were asked to participate in a flight scenation. The child sits on the back of a flying eagle within the virtual world and it’s commissioned to catch golden coins placed on a path. The children again had much easier to regulate the bird flight with their heads.
For the scientists, all of this showed that the pinnacle control in VR environments is simpler because the specified orientation is geared towards the visual input. When it involves the upper body control, the user must separate the view from the actual control, for which the coordination of head gate is required. Small children rely more on visual entries than the interior feeling of posture, and the VR environment can quickly overwhelm a baby's brain.
“The results show that immersing VR disrupt the usual coordination strategy of the kids and make the varied sensory inputs – vision, proprioception and vestibular input – in favor of seeing recent weight,” explains Miehlbritt.
“VR has been gaining in popularity, not just for leisure but so for therapeutic applications search as rehabilitation and neurorehabilitation, or the treatment of phobias or fereful situation. The diversity of scenarios that could be created and the playful Aspect that could be brothe in Activities Make this Technology Particularly Appealing for Children, and we ought to be aware that immersive vr can disrupt the kid's default coordination strategy, ”says miglebatt.
