Scientific Implications For Facebook-Oculus And Wearable Technology.

Listen to the second part of the interview with Dr. Stoffregen here.

In this episode, Gary and Nathan continued their conversation with Thomas Stoffregen, Ph.D., Professor of Kinesiology at the University of Minnesota. Tom’s current research interests include perception and control of body orientation, and its integration with simultaneous suprapostural action (research carried out in the context of human-computer interaction); postural stability and motion sickness in virtual environments; perception and control of the dynamics of actor-environment systems (i.e., perception and exploitation of affordances).

We invited Tom to talk about his research because of Facebook’s recent acquisition of Oculus and the symptoms of motion sickness that it will elicit in many users.  Tom highlighted three aspects of immersive virtual reality (VR), Oculus in particular, that are critical to the experiences it will elicit: (a) a high-resolution visual display that is fixed to your head and thus that moves with it, (b) occlusion of all parts of the visual field outside the display so the display is the only thing that is visible, and (c) head-mounted motion sensors that detect head orientation and motion so the display is stabilized relative the external environment and that objects in the display appear in fixed locations in the external environment.

Tom pointed out that head-mounted immersive VR displays first appeared in the 1990s and were touted as a game changer in all sorts of applications. One reason why those early systems weren’t commercially successful is that they caused motions sickness in many users. Based on research with other immersive VR systems over the last two decades and early experience with Oculus, many users of these VR systems will experience motion sickness. Instructions, training, or other countermeasures will require a theoretical basis for understanding motion sickness in VR and empirical evidence for it.

We journeyed back to the beginning of Tom’s career to find out how he became interested in motion sickness. NASA and the space program inspired Tom, like many young scientists in the 1970s. He had the good fortune after college to work at the Kennedy Space Center where he was exposed to many aspects of human space flight.  In graduate school, he sought issues in behavioral science that were most important to health and performance of astronauts. Motion sickness was the most well documented problem at the time but the research was not making progress fast enough. One reason may have been the relative absence of a productive dialectic.

Tom developed a unique theory of motion sickness according to which postural instability is the cause, and he developed a variety of methodologies to assess this theory relative to other descriptions and explanations of motion sickness. This led him to conduct research on motion sickness in flight simulators and virtual reality as well as on ships at sea. Individual differences in motion sickness and the unpredictable susceptibility of individuals across these provocative environments had been vexing. Tom’s research provided a path to understanding these differences: human coordination, control, and skill that are different, of necessity, across these environments. Tom’s scientific commitment thus led him from training in psychological science to a career in human movement science.

One of the indicators of quality scientific research is that it stimulates creativity and insight beyond its own claims and evidence. Some of this is reflected in Tom’s ability to transfer knowledge gained from one kind of nausogenic environment to another (e.g., sea sickness to VR sickness). More notable, however, are his recent findings that measures of postural instability preceding motion sickness can be used to predict which boxers (pugilists) are more likely to suffer nausogenic head trauma. Many other applications of Tom’s research are being pursued in his laboratory. The recent explosion of wearable and implantable sensors will provide an increasingly wide variety of relatively low-cost applications of Tom’s research to human health and performance.

Dr. Stoffregen received a Ph.D. from Cornell University in Human Experimental Psychology, and B.A. in Psychology with high honors from Oberlin College. As a Full Professor at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Stoffregen is Director of the Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory, Member of Center for Cognitive Sciences and the Graduate education faculty. He also is member of the Graduate faculty in the Department of Psychology, Department of Industrial Engineering, All University Graduate Minor in Human Factors/Ergonomics, and Graduate program in Neuroscience.

Key Terms and Concepts

• Ecological psychology
• Kinesiology
• Human movement science
• Perception and action
• Postural instability
• Motion sickness
• Nausogenic environments
• Virtual Reality (VR)