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Virtual reality in behavioral neuroscience and beyond

Nature Neuroscience volume 5, pages 1089–1092 (2002)Cite this article

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) has finally come of age for serious applications in the behavioral neurosciences. After capturing the public imagination a decade ago, enthusiasm for VR flagged due to hardware limitations, an absent commercial market and manufacturers who dropped the mass-market products that normally drive technological development. Recently, however, improvements in computer speed, quality of head-mounted displays and wide-area tracking systems have made VR attractive for both research and real-world applications in neuroscience, cognitive science and psychology. New and exciting applications for VR have emerged in research, training, rehabilitation, teleoperation, virtual archeology and tele-immersion.

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Figure 1: The VENLab at Brown University is a 40' × 40' immersive virtual reality space.
Figure 2: The virtual environments presented in the VENLab provide a feeling of total immersion.
Figure 3: An example of a complex 'secret garden' virtual environment created to study the mental representation of cognitive maps in humans.
Figure 4: Two users explore neural anatomy and the connectivity of the human brain using virtual reality (in a CAVE at Brown University).

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Acknowledgements

The VENLab was funded by a Learning and Intelligent Systems (LIS) award from the National Science Foundation (IRI-9720327) to W.H.W., M.J.T. and L.P. Kaelbling (now at M.I.T.). We thank the students and postdocs who have collaborated with us on the VENLab over the years and D. Laidlaw for his contributions to this article.

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  1. Department of Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences and Brain Science Program, Brown University, Providence, 02912, Rhode Island, USA

    Michael J. Tarr & William H. Warren

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  1. Michael J. Tarr
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  2. William H. Warren
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Tarr, M., Warren, W. Virtual reality in behavioral neuroscience and beyond. Nat Neurosci 5 (Suppl 11), 1089–1092 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn948

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