Non Anthropomorphic Virtual Reality
Inspiration
Janet Vertesi in her research for how seeing through the rovers eyes describes how the engineers and scientist at JPL NASA used the embodied experience of the rover to explore different movements and techniques the rover could do that it was not designed for initially. The scientist would imagine their own body to be the rover and behave like it is actually on mars and performing the tasks set for it.
Embodied prototyping
In order to fully immerse myself in the body of the Rover I chose the medium of virtual reality to explore the interaction and experience of emulating my self as a Mars rover. The approach was to create quick rough Unity based VR sketches that I can experience and calibrate my movements to that of the rover.
Immobilizers
One of the key insights from the quick prototyping research was the application of immobilizers, The immobilizers are movement resistance devices that allow you to move only in a limited space or axis, The key insight was that if we limit our movement to that of the virtual avatar our brain tricks itself to believe that the virtual body is in-fact its real body. This allows full immersion and removes the feeling of puppeteering the rover in VR
Each avatar has its own sets of immobilizers. The image above shows the ones that we might use to translate our human form to a mars rover.
Co-op VR control
The experience allows a user to actually emulate the behavior of the mars rover. This video demonstrate how a rover has to be controlled by a user and at the same time have some intelligence to do exactly what the mission requires. The user and the rover behaviour has to be in-sync for the mission to be successful.
User Testing
In order to understand and the interaction heuristics of the VR experience, some user studies were performed The video on the left shows the two of the several user testing done for gathering feedback on the VR experience,