Cal Poly Neuroscience Club Visits UCSB’s ReCVEB Lab

After last quarter’s amazing trip to the UCSB Brain Imaging Lab, the Neuroscience Club was hoping for an encore, and found it in UCSB’s ReCVEB lab. This stands for “Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior.” Cade McCall and his staff kindly showed us the details of their work, much of which dealt with nonverbal communication, and each of us had an opportunity to enter the virtual worlds. We wore a headset that delivered 3D visual imagery and stereo sound.

Channeling Ghostbusters at ReCVEB

In one world, we could use a hand-held clicker to control a kind of creepy disembodied hand, building block towers, and for some of the students, seeing how far they could throw them. The other world we explored was a road with a big hole you could cross on a plank. You could “jump” off the edge and explore the bottom of the hole, where there was, for no reason anybody seemed to understand, an image of a cow’s head.

I found the immersion into the virtual world to be very compelling. As I walked gingerly across the “plank,” the hole beneath me looked very real. I found it a bit disconcerting to look down without seeing my feet, though.

Cade said they had another world in which spiders jumped at you. I think I’ll pass on that one.