Imagined futures 4: Enhanced vision

Image from Wikimedia Commons

The notion of technology as a mind tool is seductive. Being able to enhance or extend any or all of the capabilities of the mind through the use of distributed memory, crowdsourced knowledge and enriched experiences is a goal for many researchers and developers, especially in education.

Perhaps the most seductive of all goals is the capability to enhance or improve vision. We've been working on it for years, correcting vision problems with spectacles and contact lenses, but more recently, we have also been experimenting with virtual reality (VR) systems. VR has many applications for entertainment and commerce, but can also be applied to education.

VR has featured in popular culture for decades. Way back in 1994, the movie Disclosure featured a high tech, futuristic virtual reality environment, and Star Trek also showcased the idea of a Holodeck as early as 1974. The term 'virtual reality' was probably coined as early as 1938 by the French playwrite Antonin Artaud who wrote about the illusory nature of theatre characters as 'la réalité virtuelle'. Today, as we experiment with visors, headsets and other forms of VR that can provide us with enhanced perceptual experiences, we are continuing to push the boundaries of what can be achieved with technology. Whatever we choose to label this experience, it is a means of feeding the visual system with images, both moving and static, and in so doing, immersing the perception of the user within the context that is being portrayed. This is an incredibly powerful way to impact on memory and emotions, because users experience visual encounters with objects and characters that simulate real encounters, without the potential danger or risk. Users can be transported to impossible realms, or places that are beyond their physical reach. The visceral experiences garnered from some VR systems are unforgettable, and can induce physical responses such as stress, raised heart rates, and even nausea and vomiting (the so-called inertia effect).

The picture above shows Hugo Gernsback demonstrating an invention called TV glasses. He designed the prototype in 1963 and although the strange looking technology depicted was merely a mock-up of the intended device, (which was never manufactured) the idea was, if you will excuse the pun - quite visionary. It contained two small screens or lenses, similar to today's VR visor configuration, and could give the user a 3-D experience of television. Whether or not this is a forerunner to modern VR, it is still a fascinating insight into what people in the 1960 thought the future might look like. In years to come, it's probable that our own recent attempts at creating VR devices might appear just as outlandish as Gernsback's TV glasses.


Imagined futures 4: Enhanced vision by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.