• Question: Could Virtual Reality enhance your work?

    Asked by anon-181158 on 8 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Damian Mole

      Damian Mole answered on 8 Jun 2018:

      Absolutely! It already does, and we are exploring ways to use VR in medical applications. I also want to use VR a lot more in how a teach and train the next generation.

    • Photo: Claire Donald

      Claire Donald answered on 8 Jun 2018:

      I have been working with lecturers from the University of Glasgow to develop a VR teaching tool for undergraduates. Some viruses are too dangerous to use in teaching labs so the students never get the chance to learn how to work with them safely. If we can make a VR lab, students can learn how to handle them without having to worry about the risk of infection. By doing this, we hope that more students will have an interest in viruses and will have an advantage if they go on to research them in the future.

    • Photo: Lauren Burns

      Lauren Burns answered on 8 Jun 2018:

      They also already use VR in psychology too! There are a couple of research studies that have found using VR in different ways to can reduce depression and anxiety, or over come fears – they call it virtual reality treatment!

    • Photo: Ashley Akbari

      Ashley Akbari answered on 9 Jun 2018:

      There have been interesting developments in VR already and lots of people are using it for teaching and learning purposes, as well as in testing and development of technology and exploration of new environments and settings

    • Photo: Hannah Farley

      Hannah Farley answered on 10 Jun 2018:

      I don’t think we understand enough about embryonic development at the timepoint I work on to accurately create a VR environment of it, so I think there would be holes in the simulation. BUT I do think it would be a cool thing to create VR of, as basically you would be being swept across the surface of the embryo by these long whip-like hairs. You might be in a bubble of signalling molecules that were about the instruct the embryo on what to do next. Then you’d hit the other side of the pit where this takes place, and see the signal being transmitted through cells and different genes being turned on.

    • Photo: Laura Hemming

      Laura Hemming answered on 10 Jun 2018:

      Great question! As many have said below, virtual reality is already thought to be quite useful in several treatments – particularly in my field, it has been found to be helpful in people with psychosis.Virtual reality has been used to make avatars of the voices that people with psychosis sometimes hear, so that the person can actually see these voices and try and build a better relationship with them.
      But, in addition to helping people to get better, I also think that there is a big place for using virtual reality in research too. It helps us to get at lots of situations which are more ‘real life’ but would otherwise be impossible to research in the moment. For example, there is some work using virtual reality to do research into police responses. VR is used in this situation to recreate fake crime scenes which can be manipulated between groups and then to see how police officers would respond to the situation. This wouldn’t be possible in real life crime scenes as researchers would likely not be given access to these situations.

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