VR could use a muscle-stimulating device that forces your head to turn

A device that uses electrodes to stimulate points on the neck can force a wearer to turn their head – which could be used to direct attention in virtual reality environments

By Paul Marks

Applying muscle-stimulating electrodes to carefully selected points on the necks of volunteers can make the wearer look up or down, or side to side – which could be useful for steering attention in a 3D virtual reality (VR) training or gaming environment, and potentially in augmented reality (AR) applications in the real world, too.

It might sound like taking a sinister level of control of somebody’s body, but the underlying idea, says Yudai Tanaka at the University of Chicago, is to create a way of steering a user’s attention to something they really need to see.

Currently, the only …