The Rise of Phantom Sense in VR

There are a growing number of reports on social media and other connected channels of a new phenomenon associated with VR use. Dubbed ‘phantom sense’ users are reporting that they are experiencing sensations that shouldn’t exist and that they wouldn’t experience were they not in a VR world.

What is Phantom Sense?

Phantom sense is a psychological phenomenon in which people perceive feelings in virtual reality that are unrelated to touch, sight or sound. It is essential to amputees, who need this sensation to help them use any artificial limb that is attached. Without the feeling, they have difficulty in using the fake limb properly. Now, it seems that VR is getting so realistic that people are starting to get phantom feelings in virtual worlds.

VR has allowed people to take on avatar forms that may have features that humans usually don’t, such as tails, whiskers, and fur. Many VR users are now experiencing sensations through these imaginary appendages and covering. But it goes further too. There are reports that people feel heat from virtual fires and experience some kind of feedback when touching surfaces. It all sounds very weird, so what is going on?

Phantom Sense is a Growing VR Phenomenon

As VR becomes more realistic, the worlds that we find ourselves thrust into become increasingly believable. As it does so, we become presented with worlds and scenarios that make us believe what we are seeing is, in fact, real. This increased realism has led to a growing number of VR users to experience this phantom sensation where experiences within the world are perceived as actually occurring. 

Imagine that you are standing in a virtual field with a Meta Quest 3 strapped on your head. You feel warmth as the sun shines overhead. You get chills when the air rustles a hill of tall grasses close-by. You automatically smack the back of your head as flies buzz by your ear. Every one of them is a phantom sense instance. In this situation, vision is the predominant sense and your brain is filling those blanks in for you to help make sense of what it sees; neither your VR headset nor its controllers contain technology to make you feel heat, wind, or bugs crawling on you, but you feel them anyway.

Phantom Sense: The Technical Bit

VR technology wants to take you to a different place without you having to leave your living room. A lot of money has been spent by Meta, Microsoft, and other companies to make virtual reality feel more like, well, life. Technology to make computers brighter and body tracking more accurate are both parts of this, just as psychological experiments. By using this to their advantage, VR companies hope to do with your mind what hardware alone can’t. The mind is a powerful machine for perception that can easily change to new surroundings. But people are already aware of how open your mind is to being tricked.

From a scientific perspective, the feeling of a phantom sense refers to the perception of a tactile sensation i.e. touch – without there being any real physical stimulus being applied. It is essentially creating a feeling that isn’t actually there; which is ironic since the user is in a world that isn’t really there either. This phenomenon occurs when the brain misinterprets neural signals, often due to changes in the nervous system following an injury like amputation, or even in virtual reality environments, leading to the experience of feeling touch where there is none. In terms of VR, the self-images that a person is receiving about their avatar leads their brain to subconsciously believe that they really do have whiskers or a tail, and assigns perceived feeling to those appendages. 

In early experiments investigating phantom limbs, many studies found that if a life-like rubber hand was placed where an amputee was expecting their own hand to be, and stimulus such as a pin used, the patient would squeal in pain, despite no actual stimuli being applied to them. It is exactly the same with the phantom sense in VR; visually, a user expects a touch sensation via their fake appendage, and the brain supplies it. Spooky Stuff..!

Could Phantom Sense Be a Good Thing?

Although the phenomena of phantom feeling is rather widespread among VR users, not everyone reports having it, though it may be that they simply haven’t placed their brain in the right combination of circumstances for the sensation to kick in. 

It is unclear how many users will suffer phantom feelings, although a growing number prefer to feel them since it gives users a much more realistic experience. After all, if the purpose of virtual reality is to recreate reality as nearly as possible, it requires more than just a screen and headphones. Touch, smell, taste, and other senses cannot be duplicated on a hardware level without the use of a haptic device, thus your brain’s capacity to cause you to hallucinate such experiences enhances the immersion of the VR experience. 

Aside from the initial weirdness, the phantom sense may well be the next step in the evolution of virtual worlds and the Metaverse, if only it could be reliably controlled. At the moment, we rely on physical devices such as haptic suits to give us the sensations of feeling in on-line universes, but these can only do so much. If the phantom sense could be harnessed, then you give people the feeling of touch in a much more natural way, and there is the potential to fool the brain into a sense of smell too.  

 

We at Unity Developers are excited about these new developments and look forward to future developments in this area. If you have an XR or AI project that you would like our team of professionals to help you with, why not contact us and let’s get talking.