Motion Sensing Outside of Entertainment or Games

First of all, a great thanks to EON Realiy for their informative and educational presentation. It opened our eyes to some of the other uses of motion sensing and enhanced visual technologies, that is outside of simply entertainment.

It was seen that motion sensing technology and enhanced visual such as 3D monitor and holographic display is very useful in serious industrial applications, such as simulation and training. Why would this be so?

Benefits:

1. Improving knowledge retention.

In philosophy, or psychology, there is this term called "qualia". Qualia simply means the raw experience of something. It is also studied that vivid qualia might be associated with enhanced memory retention. Hence, when training staff, instead of using training videos, or asking them to read a thick manual, a more vivid experience of the work itself will greatly improve their learning efficiency.

2. Reduces cost.

Next would be cost. It is definitely possible to allow the staff a realistic experience of training without simulation technology, by, say, allowing them to participate in the event itself. However, there is the issue of cost. We can't let doctors operate on real patients for practise, or training firemen on how to fight fire by starting fire on buildings. Using a realistic simulation process, we can greatly reduce the cost of simulation, yet achieving a near realistic experience.

Possible Problems:

Nevertheless, the current motion sensing + augmented reality technologies are still not quite yet mature, much improvements are still required:

1. The issue of fatigue with motion sensing.

Reading a manual, or watching a training video in air-con rooms are not going to cause much fatigue (falling into sleep out of boredom doesn't count). However, when interacting with the system using motion sensing, you have to move your body, exaggerated movement at times so that the system can register it. Doing so for a long time will cause quite an amount of physical exertion and would be not be able to be carried out over a long time. Hence, motion sensing could probably only used as a complementary mode of interaction, and not totally replacing other modes of interaction.

2. Issue of fatigue as well for 3D immersion technologies.

There is also a problem with 3D immersion technologies causing fatigue to the audience. This is mainly due to how stereoscopic 3D is being implemented. Stereoscopic 3D utilizes having 2 images in different view points, and showing to each of your eyes a different perspective to simulate depth perception. However, the problem with this is that now your brain has to absorb twice the amount of information, which inevitably will cause eye and mental fatigue if used for a long period of time.

Conclusion:

Nevertheless, this is definitely an area with high potential. With further improvements of such technologies in the future, such immersive method of interaction will definitely improve how we work, study and play in the future. To end off, let us show a video on Cisco's teleprescence technology to give us a glimpse into how immersive interaction in the future could be: