Virtual Reality is being used in more diverse fields every month, but the variety of uses where it’s proving its worth is surprising. NASA has announced that it has sent HTC headsets to the International Space Station on a Dragon resupply spacecraft. NASA has included an experiment to improve astronaut health, which will involve wearing the headset for a year and a half to improve mental health.
Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen of the European Space Agency will be the first to use VR headsets to measure their effects on his mental health. Mogensen and other astronauts will wear the headsets for more than six months before returning home with the rest of the Crew-7 mission. Participants in the experiment will undergo “in-flight test sessions consisting of virtual reality video viewing and questionnaires,” according to NASA.
The HTC VIVE Focus 3 headsets they’ll be using are tailored to operate in microgravity. XRHealth and HTC’s VIVE division collaborated with a software consultancy called Nord-Space Aps to design a VR simulator tailored to the microgravity conditions of space. A microgravity environment like the ISS can be particularly challenging for headsets like the VIVE Focus 3, particularly for orientation and tracking, since these devices typically use gravity to align your eyes. Previous headsets sent into space caused motion sickness and proved unusable for reading content. XRHealth’s simulator uses a physically based tracking method.
The experiment aims to help astronauts with mental health issues associated with long-term space travel, such as isolation, stress, and feelings of confinement and lack of privacy.
