Space station astronauts will soon give you the option to enter virtual reality to assist stay mentally healthy away from their home planet.
An HTC Vive Focus 3 virtual reality (VR) headset will fly to the International Space Station (ISS) on a SpaceX cargo ship launching no sooner than Thursday (Nov. 9), health care platform company XRHealth announced on Nov. 2. You possibly can watch SpaceX’s Dragon cargo ship launch live here at Space.com, via NASA Television.
Once attached for space experiments, the headset will “treat astronauts for mental health conditions” related to living in space for long periods of time, which might include feelings of isolation, stress and confinement. European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Andreas Mogensen has pledged to check the headset during his half-year mission, which incorporates commanding the ISS.
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ISS astronauts live in what are considered isolated, confined environments (ICE); simply put, these are zones where people work in operational circumstances in small teams distant from assistance. Examples include research bases within the Arctic and Antarctic, submarines and naturally, spacecraft, resulting in many years of studies on how best to assist personnel in these circumstances, in keeping with a 2021 study in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.
Based on their peer-reviewed survey of the sector, the authors of that 2021 study noted that teams already properly screened and chosen for an ICE mission could have the most effective outcomes with “leadership, coping and interpersonal skills training … during and after long-duration missions.” The study was co-authored by the University of Southern California’s Lawrence Palinkas and the University of British Columbia’s Peter Suedfeld, two oft-cited authors in the sector of ICE who even have done many space studies.
NASA and other space agencies already include quite a few tools to assist crews with mental health readiness. Astronauts train in ICE environments on the bottom that include caves, wilderness excursions and underwater habitats. While in space, astronauts speak with a psychologist not less than once every two weeks, in keeping with the Canadian Space Agency. In addition they have scheduled rest times, regular calls with family and friends and encouragement to pursue hobbies in orbit.
While removed from the primary headset to fly in space, the brand new HTC Vive will include a simulator mode “specially developed and adapted to work with the microgravity environment,” officials wrote within the statement.
Past VR headsets had an inclination to induce motion sickness because of “multiple challenges around tracking and orientation (comparable to) jittering, rolling and drifting of the content,” as headsets normally use gravity to align the view, in keeping with XRHealth’s Nov. 2 statement. The participating corporations — which include XRHealth, Nord-Space Aps and HTC Vive — made unspecified changes to this headset to make it work higher on the ISS.
Mogensen and other experiment participants will do “in-flight testing sessions comprised of VR video viewing and questionnaires”, NASA officials stated of the experiment. The astronauts will accomplish that with an app from ESA called EveryWear, which has been adapted from a previous version that measured food intake.
The outcomes may even be adapted for most of the people to assist in stress management , especially for conditions including anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
“Astronauts are essentially isolated during their missions for months and years at a time, and are confined to small spaces with limited contact with family and friends,” Per Lundahl Thomsen, chief technology officer at Nord-Space Aps, said within the Nov. 2 statement.
“Making a virtual platform that addresses their mental health needs while in isolation is imperative for them to keep up a healthy lifestyle once they return,” Thomsen added. “We partnered with corporations that provide probably the most advanced technologies that may very well be adapted for space to supply probably the most helpful experience for our astronauts.”
Many other VR headsets have flown to the ISS, in keeping with NASA materials. A number of the many applications have included controlling robots, helping with maintenance tasks and training, performing experiments to see how astronaut bodies adapt to space and filming immersive reality videos to share the ISS experience publicly.
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