R3 – VR Research: Non-Visual Precursors

Virtual Reality isn’t new. The visual flavor has been around for some time, and is gaining increasing popularity and widespread use these days with such advancements as Youtube 360 and Google Cardboard. However, the idea of creating an alternate immersive reality, virtual or not, has been around for centuries and, one might argue, since the beginning of time.

Here, I examine three non-visual domains in which we have become so technologically adept to fool our senses into believing something about the reality in which we inhabit that is untrue with respect to the prototypical physical reality we associate with everyday life. They are:

1. Audition, especially with respect to Binaural Audio and alternate means of immersion in sound landscapes.
2. Sensory Deprivation, as it pertains to removing or replacing senses with constructed fields of homogeneity.
3. Haptics, a new field of research aimed at reproducing the sense of touch.

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