The metaverse has the potential to be an amazing place, to live experiences perhaps impossible in real life. So why do researchers keep trying to find ways to make us suffer?
After machine to simulate pain in virtual reality, now there’s a prototype for you to feel like you’re choking on a real fire. Check it out in the video.
A team from the University of Salzburg for Applied Sciences in Austria has published recent research at the CHI – Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems about a mask that simulates the process of breathing (and by extension also shortness of breath).
Named AirRes, it can be attached to various types of virtual reality devices already available on the market, such as the Meta Quest 2.
The upside is that it monitors your breathing and incorporates it into VR, supposedly amplifying the feeling of immersion. So you would be able, for example, to inflate a balloon or blow out a candle in the metaverse.
In games like “The Last of Us 2”, where you need to press a button to “hold your breath” and improve the accuracy of an archery shot, you could just hold your breath for real.
The flip side is that AirRes can also hamper your ability to breathe. Obviously, nobody wants a game that realistically simulates what it’s like to be asphyxiated (imagine the lawsuits this could cause!) However, this simulation can be useful in virtual training of firefighters, for example.
Another application would be in flight simulators, where the G-force, the result of high-speed maneuvers, make it very difficult for the pilot to breathe.
The project, however, still exists only as a prototype. At first, there is no intention that it will be marketed to the public.
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