VIRTUAL REALITY improves well-being
Photo by www.lyncconf.com/ (Creative Commons Licence, unaltered)
JUNE 8TH, 2022
Feeling socially isolated is really bad for people’s physical and mental health. This isn’t new. We’ve known since at least the 1980s that those who feel socially disconnected die earlier and suffer more mental health complaints like depression and anxiety than those who feel well connected with other people. The new part of this story is that, according to research published today in the highly respected journal Neurology, there is now evidence to suggest that loneliness can actually result in brain shrinkage. So what has all this got to do with virtual reality (VR)?
Well one of the most compelling features of VR is that it is fairly straightforward these days to get multiple people into the same virtual space. When several people are all in the same VR experience together it really truly feels like you are all in the same room, even if you’re actually separated by many hundreds of miles. And once you feel convinced that you are side-by-side with your co-workers the feelings of social isolation evaporate.
Multi-person VR experiences make people feel properly socially connected in a way that a phone or video calls can only dream of. The arrival of affordable VR is incredibly well timed, because the inexorable rise of remote working has led to many reports hitting the press in recent months, documenting the steadily increasing numbers of workers feeling disconnected from others in their team. It may seem strange but even under circumstances where a team is in constant contact via instant messaging, email and voice calls, workers are nonetheless finding themselves burdened by feelings of loneliness. And it all boils down to how well each of these communication technologies approximates to the kind of face to face human contact that our brains evolved to need over the course of hundreds of thousands of years.
Human brains in particular have vast territories of cortex that became specialised for processing social information, which isn’t just conveyed in our voices but also in our body language. We feel so much more intimately connected with other people when in close physical proximity to them, a feature that is completely absent when communicating via screens. Not only are we usually represented in other people’s immediate environment by a tiny postage stamp-sized segment laptop screen, but more often than not our hand gestures are forever moving out of shot.
Interacting with others in VR, on the other hand, makes you feel like you are genuinely in the company of others: voices can be heard with full 3D spatial fidelity (if someone to the right of you starts speaking you find yourself turning towards them, exactly as you would do in the real world) AND their head and hand gestures are captured so faithfully you can usually tell who’s who just from the way they hold their body. Thanks to its peerless ability to create the illusion of PRESENCE when team members hang out in VR together they really feel like they are in close proximity to each other, even when they are separated by many miles, which fundamentally improves the sense of social connectedness.
Brain Man VR is on a mission to make it as easy as possible for companies to realise that virtual reality can play a critical role in improving employee well-being as well as helping teams to function more efficiently. Not only that but these days it is affordable for most (if not all) small to medium sized companies. So what are you waiting for? Drop us a line to book in for your Jumpstart into VR session…
