You may have heard that NASA is looking for astronauts, but you probably don’t yet realize that adding being a ‘gamer’ to your Curriculum Vitae could help your chances of becoming part of the space station, since NASA and Sony have been working together to use virtual reality to help train operators who control robots in space..
According to RoadtoVR, Robonaut 2 is a very dexterous NASA robot that could use a little human help. Even though the space agency has experience in carefully calculated and planned maneuvers, nothing better than human movement to execute commands.
That’s why NASA collaborated with Sony to create a PlayStation VR demo, a technique called Mighty Morphenaut, to see if virtual reality is the answer. This demo is a real-time simulation showing a virtual space station.
In the aforementioned PlayStation VR demo the operator lifts and moves tools among other robotic actions, replicating some of the real-life challenges an operator may face when using virtual reality to control a humanoid robot, such as range movement or time delays, which are crucial when considering the differences between Earth and space.
Similarly, they ensure that the delay time is a great training tool for operators, as it allows the student operator to get used to planning for the delay, as well as that when training for the first time, the trainees cannot accomplish nothing on the assigned task, but with practice, they are able to readjust their expectations for the time lag.
According to the virtual media review, the PlayStation VR demo has helped with the understanding of the time delay, but has not yet solved the problems with the prediction of movement of floating objects, so the space agency will continue its investigation on VR in the future.
