About Us

Kinesiology isn’t just fun and games.  The human vestibular system is a highly complex and sensitive system that has a huge impact on the way humans function. If you’ve ever experienced vertigo, you know what can happen when the data sent by the inner ear conflicts with the data our other senses relay to the brain.  In interfacing with computers, we’ve always just turned off or ignored our inner ear.  Our brain tells our senses to believe what the eyes see, because there is no corresponding (or better yet, contradictory) motion data.

Our research indicates that when motion cues are introduced into a human/computer interface, the inner ear data becomes the most important for the brain to deal with.  Indeed, we ran tests on our motion platforms where we scaled down the screen resolution to barely 320x200 pixels, and when motion was introduced, players often couldn’t tell that they were looking at a low resolution screen because their brains were dealing with the motion cues.  The human inner ear really is that powerful.

The motion platform systems themselves have been involved in cutting-edge research.  In 1997 we worked with Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute during the Atacama Desert Trek, where their robot named Nomad operated for 45 days, often autonomously.  We set up a platform in the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh and beamed back video and motion data, so visitors could feel every bump of a vehicle operating in real time a continent away.  Riders were astonished at the experience.

That experiment led to further work with NASA and commercial space companies.  We developed prototype planetary rovers and tied them into our motion platform systems.  We even presented a paper at the Proceedings of the Thirteenth SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing in 2001, entitled:  Human Factors Issues for Telepresence Robots, discussing the role of motion data in understanding planetary exploration datasets.   We demonstrated that for 1/1000^th of spectrum necessary to bring back video from another planet, we could bring back orientation data to allow the researcher to completely feel his/her surroundings. This work led us to one inescapable conclusion:  a virtual environment can never be fully immersive if the inner ear is not fed data.  In other words, without motion, you can never have a completely immersive VR experience.