RL Specs - Human Senses [Video Script]

• The 5 senses. This is common way many people refer to our abilities to experience the so called real world.
• However, this video isn’t called the 5 senses for a reason, that is because it’s wrong by most accounts.
• The traditional 5 senses model is actually over 2 thousand years old and is most commonly first attributed to the greek philosopher, Aristotle, who attributed each sense to the 5 elements of the time.
• fire was sight. water was taste. earth was touch. upper air was hearing, and lower air was smell.
• As these 5 senses are rather obviously incorrect now, so too is the model’s neat form as there are actually quite a lot of independent senses in the human body depending on how you classify them.
• Let’s do a brief list to get a few down:
• Starting with the traditional 5, we have:
• vision (photoreception)
• hearing (audition)
• touch (tactition/mechanoreception)
• smell (olfaction)
• and taste (gustation)
• They seem to cover quite a bit, until you then move on to some of the more complex bits.
• We have thermoception, or the sense of temperature
• hunger, the sense of a need for sustenance
• thirst, the detection of a need for fluids
• excretion, the sense of a need to evacuate one’s bowels
• nociception, the sense of pain
• chemoreception, or the sense of suffocation, the lack of oxygen within blood cells
• balance (equilibrioception), this one’s quite the nuisance for VR at the moment.
• proprioception, the sense of your body’s location in space, this is what the close your eyes, extend your arms and touch your nose test is for.
• kinesthesia, the sense of bodily movement
• time, yup that’s its own thing
• itch (Irritation), bizarre that this has it’s own receptor in our body
• magnetoception, no, Christopher Nolan isn’t known to currently be working on an Xmen film.
• and pressure, of the body being squeezed sort.
• We have a good 18 senses there don’t we? See why the Aristotelian model is rather inadequate? Don’t worry, it can be worse.
• What happens when we subdivide senses by sub areas?
• Vision would be split by rods and cones into color and brightness, perhaps RGB for color?
• Taste could done by the 5 flavors, sweet, bitter, sour, salty, and umami
• temperature by hot and cold.
• Heck, if we go at it this way I personally would want to add logical constructs into senses as well so we could have senses like
• forms, consistency, depth, distance, scale, complexity, I think we get the picture.
• So now we know some of the fundamentals behind human senses, let’s cover their relevance to VR.
• Humans in many ways are just a system with a lot of pieces.
• Systems are just an entity consisting of an input, a process, and an output.
• Our senses are our inputs, our conscious the process, and actions the outputs
• For VR to reach it’s peak, all 3 would preferably be placed into a simulation, but for the reality aspect alone, the input needs completely immersed. If we have no idea what they, can’t target them now can we?
• Some senses are somewhat “easier” to cover than others since their origins lay in organs we have direct access to, like the eyes and ears
• others are trickier to deal with due to being either internally located like hunger and chemoception or being based in more multiple sensory organ systems like proprioception and equilibrioception.
• The effectiveness of VR technology can be measured more or less by how well it can immerse the user’s senses, so finding ways to deal with some of the more difficult senses will be of value.
• If I had to make a suggestion for the near term, I’d suggest avoiding most of the more difficult internal senses like hunger, chemoception, pain and such since they tend to be of the most vital importance. Pain and hunger may suck, but they’re there for a reason and that reason isn’t supplanted just because you’re hanging around in VR.