Making Judgments & Decisions in the VR world

Recently, I have a joint research project with Company X in Tokyo. This company develops the devices for virtual reality (VR). The devices are used for driving, flight, and surgical training.

Fortunately, the researchers and engineers of the company became interested in my specialty, Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM), I was invited to the research team as a guest researcher and consultant. My duties are to evaluate the trainees' performance as well as to compare the real and VR world.

Although there are still huge gaps and differences, it's no doubt quality of VR has improved dramatically. However, compared with the real world, the VR world is still missing various conditions and factors that exist in the real world --wind pressure, smell, sense of touch, subtle changes in light intensity, shadow, etc. Copying such conditions and factors in the VR world is virtually impossible.

Our judgments and decisions in the real world are directly and indirectly influenced by various conditions and factors while there is/are critical one/s that lead/s to our final decision, or so-called decisive factor/s. Decisive factors are among other related-decisive factors that may help our judgments and decisions. Good decision makers can find out decisive factor/s among them properly.

One of our significant findings was that as the VR world contains more indirect factors we tend to receive more favorable feedback from the trainees and research participants. However, if we add more indecisive (or non-decisive) factors in the VR world, the evaluation became lower.

It's my pleasure I can somehow contribute to the Japanese VR research through my specialty.