The purpose of launching RiMM is to provide a new means of ensuring people’s safety. By using VR training rations to allow people to move their bodies while experiencing training, we have commercialized it as a way to efficiently teach the body how to perform operations such as work sequences. We also found that it is difficult to immerse people in a virtual space using only vision. By reproducing environmental sounds, people will learn how to sense the work environment and become more immersed in the virtual space. In order to virtually reproduce dangerous events, we experimentally seek to evoke the experience of a person falling by reproducing the sense of balance that prepares the body, and to feel the fear of falling. In addition, in reproducing disasters in which the body is injured, we will learn that transmission through touch and pain is important in expressing fear. In order to improve people’s safety awareness through physical experiences in virtual spaces, we experimentally find that moderate fear improves risk awareness. We will focus on the negative five senses and concentrate on reproducing various disasters. We have already developed and commercialized technology to reproduce the sense of smell. We have commercialized a system that allows virtual experiences through the five senses, excluding taste.
By continuing to recreate various workplace accidents, we make new discoveries. We found that the combination of the five senses required to create a physical sensation from a disaster is different. We confirmed that there are very few cases where people feel scared through sight. We found that there are many types of fear that people feel from workplace accidents, such as the fear of being injured, the fear of losing posture, and the fear of a sudden change in the environment. This raises the question of how people feel fear and how the feeling of fear occurs. We begin to think about the mechanism by which people feel fear. As we advance the biochemical research into fear, we find that the body has a mechanism that automatically judges fear based on human experience. Here, we focus on “past experience”. First, we imagine a case where a person is born and experiences that are stored in the brain, and judges fear based on that memory. Next, we consider the mechanism that has been inherited from before the birth of living organisms. We are beginning to understand the mechanism by which people record fear in their bodies based on the memories they experienced during the evolution of living organisms. When an organism experiences a life-threatening danger, the experience is recorded in the genes and passed on to future generations, and the mechanism by which this happens is being elucidated academically. It has also been discovered that the nerves in the body are the same as the nerves in the brain, and the mechanism by which memories are recorded in the nerves is also being elucidated. In this way, we are beginning to understand the mechanism by which people automatically judge fear based on various experiences.
There is only a little time left in 2023. This will be the last blog post of this year. The next one is scheduled to be posted on January 6, 2025. Thank you very much for reading this blog.