My name is Mattias Wallergård
I work as a researcher at Lund University
in Sweden the simplest way to explain
who I am is by stating that I'm a
virtual reality nerd. I had this passion
for the virtual environment since I was
really small - just a kid - as an adult I
managed to become a researcher in this
very exciting field. Basically what we
try to achieve in BlueHealth is to see
if we can apply virtual reality technology
for a group that I believe really really
really need virtual reality. Sometimes we see
virtual reality being pushed into areas where
it's like just becoming a gimmick, but here
what we see is elderly people for
example in elderly care centers maybe
don't get out that much maybe don't get
that many visitors. We know it can be
quite difficult for some of these people
to get out in nature so what we're
thinking is if you can't bring them
to nature, why not bring nature to them
instead? And that's what we want to try
to do in BlueHealth. Basically trying to
build a virtual reality system you can
bring into, for example, an elderly care
center and have the people there
getting all sorts of different
experiences of nature. What we are driven
by is really exploring interactivity and
agency. That sounded very academic but
what what do I mean with that? Well
basically virtual reality is something
that you should do in real time you can
actually have an effect on the virtual
computer-generated environment you could
pick up an object you could splash the
water you could maybe even cut down a
tree if you want to do that. What level
of interactivity do you want? Is it
enough to be able to walk around pick
some flowers or maybe that
gets boring after a couple of weeks
maybe want something more advanced and
then we have the social dimension also.
You could think that closing people in a
virtual reality helmet is maybe not the
best idea I mean people are social
creatures why shouldn't we
also explore the social dimension and
that's something else we really would
like to do. We need to work in very close
collaboration with other people the other
partners of the project. For example we
work closely with the Estonian University
of Life Sciences and they know about how
to design these blue environments - we're
not trying to just use our gut feeling
building something, "Here this looks like
a good nature environment" we really need
to base this on good solid research that
already exists. What we're doing right
now is we're in kind of a design phase
we invite a group of elderly people who
are healthy - healthy enough to come to
our VR Lab and basically what we do is we
invite them to participate in the work
we're doing so we show them stuff, let
them test stuff, we talk with them and
then based on the data that we collect
in this work we do an iteration.
That means that we try to improve
what we have done so far and then we
test again and then we evaluate again
and then we test again, until we have
some kind of virtual nature experience
that we feel okay now this is good
enough to bring to the next stage. What I
find very fascinating with this project is
that we will have different approaches
to the same question and University of
Exeter have a different approach to us
but it complements what we do very very
well I think. So in Exeter the
researchers look more into what
kind of response can you get from more
photorealistic so-called 360 films but
that maybe doesn't have so much
interaction and agency but still I
believe we can reach a long
way with that kind of technology but the
question is: are there differences
between these two approaches? And in that
case how large are the differences?
Because it might be that as
researchers and designers we think "People
need to be able to pick up a stone and
throw it in the water of course that's
really important." But maybe it turns out
that it's not important at all,
it's something else in VR that triggers
the kind of response we're after and
maybe 360 films is good enough for
this but then again maybe in some
situations and for some users it's not
enough and then we would need a more
interactive virtual nature experience. So
contrasting these two approaches I think
is extremely interesting and important
for the project actually.