UC faculty teams with TV producers to explore horizons in VR

By: Michelle Flanagan

Imagine being submerged in a pool. A school of fish swims past and three dinosaurs come to visit you. They swim around you, over your head, making noises. Do you reach out? Stay quiet and hide?  

That’s exactly what children involved in a ground-breaking virtual reality (VR) study at the University of Cincinnati’s McMicken College of Arts and Sciences were faced with. While virtual reality splashed onto the scene for average users with Google Cardboard in 2014, much research remains to be done on early adopters in non-medical applications. UC faculty are working to bridge that gap.

Associate professor of Communication Nancy Jennings and assistant professor of Communication Tony Liao teamed up to research children’s reactions to a VR experience that involved dinosaurs swimming in a pool.

The study was conducted in partnership with Toronto-based Sinking Ship Entertainment, the production company behind the Emmy-nominated children’s TV show “Dino Dana,” which is exploring creating a VR extension for the show. Because the industry is still unclear about how children might respond to VR, the producer wanted to conduct a study to determine how to maximize both the entertainment and educational potential of its program. 

The study involved 29 children, ages six to eight, who came into the lab to experience the VR and were then interviewed about the difference between VR and reality, and had their physical responses to the VR stimulus measured.

Sinking Ship Entertainment designed the VR experience, which had two components. First, the child saw a visualization of an open field, which featured a field of grass, trees, butterflies, and chirping birds. Here, the child could adjust to wearing the VR headset and ensure everything was working correctly. After that stage, they moved in to a visualization of a swimming pool. In the pool, the child was immersed under water where a school of fish was always swimming by. In succession, three different dinosaurs swam past the child, each of which made a sound and then completed a short circle around the child. This visualization was on a loop, so the three dinosaurs visited the child twice and lasted five minutes.

Jennings, who also serves as director of UC’s Children’s Education and Entertainment Research Lab, explains that this study was exploratory in some ways, simply because so little is known about children’s VR experiences. “The manufacturers of many VR devices do not recommend VR use for children under the age of 12 or 13. However, we know that once a VR device is in the household, younger children are going to use it,” she says. “In fact, half of the children in our study had already had a VR experience prior to participating!”

While the decision to base the study on dinosaurs was largely due to the partnership with the creators of “Dino Dana,” Jennings says that dinosaurs provide rich subject matter because they were real, but are no longer alive. This gives the study an interesting twist in the ability to explore children’s understanding of what is real versus pretend in a virtual setting. 

Groundbreaking research such as this project supports the university’s Next Lives Here strategic initiative, which emphasizes academic excellence, urban impact and innovation. The innovation platform encourages the university as a whole to come together to focus on solving new and emerging problems with creative solutions. This imeans finding new ways to learn, which will lead to new ways to solve problems locally, nationally and globally.

To date, research has produced a notable body of findings around VR and its medical uses, but there is a comparative lack of study around everyday uses of the technology.

“The difference with those [studies about VR, medicine, and children] is often that they are tailored clinical interventions, and sometimes involve very expensive and complex whole room virtual simulation environments,” explains Liao. “Ours focused on questions not related to a particular medical outcome, but more generally about processing and reality distinction.  It looked at a more everyday application of a child playing a game.”