As some students continue classes in online and socially-distanced settings, a new course at Mount Royal University is running via virtual reality (VR), which the school says is the first of its kind.
The course, titled The Digital Frontier: Perception, Virtual Reality, and AI in Psychology, focuses on psychological theory, human perception of artificial intelligence and VR. The VR world created for the course serves as a hands-on format for the course material.
Tony Chaston, an MRU psychology professor who created the course, has a research background in human sensation and perception of environments and light. After crafting the course content, Chaston decided VR would be the ideal format.
“We could learn by just experiencing things like, ‘What do you see around you? What do you hear? Do you see any of the rules and principles that we talked about?’ You can only do that if you’re in VR,” Chaston said.
Chaston, inspired by the Rocky Mountains, filled his VR space with trees and lakes. Breakout rooms were replaced by campfires. Launched this fall, the first day of class was a new experience for the 20 enrolled students and Chaston alike.
“I did have a little bit of a moment when on that first day of class, all my students actually made it successfully into my digital classroom and they were all in front of me and I was on stage for the first time on this platform,” Chaston said. “I have to admit, that was pretty cool.”
Ashlene Dembicki, a fifth-year honours psychology student enrolled in the course, said she sees much potential for VR in her future career as a psychologist.
“I want to be the best psychologist I possibly can be one day, so I want to start perfecting using tools such as VR,” Dembicki said. “I ideally want to be working with trauma-based clients and VR works incredibly with them for mindfulness and for desensitization.”
The potential of VR as a tool for psychology has been observed by other researchers. According to a study by Giuseppe Riva, a professor of psychology at the Catholic University of Milan, VR can create secure environments where patients can confront issues that may be difficult to discuss with a therapist in person.
Exposure therapy, commonly used in VR therapy sessions, aims to tame fears and traumatic experiences through virtual exposure to triggers, according to Quinta Seon, a research assistant at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute in Montreal.
She also said VR psychiatry is ideal for reaching remote communities and can be tailored to different cultures so participants feel more comfortable.
“Psychiatry is always going to be building towards trying to make everyone’s lives easier, more accessible, more equitable,” Seon said. “That’s where VR is trying to go.”
Erik Christiansen, an MRU assistant professor and librarian with an IT background who helped Chaston troubleshoot issues during the course’s development, said VR can be ideal for programs such as psychology and engineering that traditionally require hands-on demonstrations. He also pointed to VR’s potential for nursing with surgical simulations.
“Rather than using dummies and dolls and things that have limited feedback, if there’s somebody on the other end playing the other character, there’s some really cool kind of role-playing and stuff that you could do to train people in those situations,” Christiansen said.
Dembicki said she finds VR to be more engaging than an online or in-person class.
“I actually think I focus better in this [class] than in person or during Zoom,” Dembicki said. “This way, I have no way to access my phone or emails or talk to anyone. I am in my basement and forced to focus because I have to have my headset on at all times or I miss something.”
Christiansen said students likely won’t be seeing their in-person classes go virtual. But the age of VR may just be starting.
“VR in particular, I think, is really going to be the logical next step for online learning,” Christiansen said. “Ultimately, it’s an area of interest, not just for gaming, but for connection and communication.
In an era of online classes, Chaston said he believes holding more classes in VR could be a huge improvement from logging onto Zoom calls.
“This is an opportunity to explore if this could be a new avenue for distance learning, something that would create a sense of interaction and community that traditional distance learning doesn’t,” Chaston said.
Dembicki said VR’s true value is its ability to foster a sense of community.
“It would be my dream to give everyone in the whole world a VR headset—so they are able to experience new sights and connect with people they would never have the opportunity to, especially the most vulnerable [populations],” she said.
Featured image provided by Tony Chaston.
