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Lost in cyberspace

迷失在网络空间

英文部分选自经济学人191123science and technology版块

Virtual reality  

虚拟现实

Lost in cyberspace

迷失在网络空间

VR continues to make people sick—and women more so than men

VR晕动症—女性尤为其扰

The whole history of fiction shows that alternative realities are an attractive and profitable idea. So back in the 1990s, when electronics had arrived at a point where people could build headsets that blocked off actual reality and replaced it with a virtual version created inside a computer, it looked as if something world-changing might have arrived. Games companies were particularly excited, and Nintendo, Sega and Virtuality duly piled in.

小说的整个发展史表明，另类现实是一个诱人且吸金的想法。因此，早在上世纪90年代，随着电子科技的发展，人们制造出头戴式VR头盔（一种屏蔽现实世界从而营造一个虚拟世界的设备），这在当时看来是颠覆世界的变化。游戏公司尤为兴奋，任天堂、世嘉以及虚空公司（Virtuality）都纷纷上车。

The world, however, stubbornly refused to be changed. It might have put up with the low-resolution images, the choppy scene transitions and the poor controls, for these would surely have got better. It might also have put up with the price (the headsets in question could cost up to $70,000), for that would surely have come down. It could not, though, accommodate the dizziness, nausea, eye strain, vomiting, headaches, sweating and disorientation that many of the technology’s users (more than 60%, according to one study) complained of—a set of symptoms that, collectively, have come to be called “cyber-sickness”. Though not fatal to people, cyber-sickness certainly helped damage the industry, which more or less vanished.

然而，世界总是顽固地抗拒变化。人们可以忍受不清晰的画质、不流畅的切换以及不精确的控制，因为这些肯定会得到改善。人们也可以忍受高昂的价格（这里谈到的耳机价格高达7万美元），因为将来价格肯定会下跌。但是，人们无法适应晕眩、恶心、视觉疲劳、呕吐、头疼、冒汗和方向感丧失这一系列症状，统称为“晕动症”，据一项研究表明，超过60%的VR使用者出现过此类症状。虽然“晕动症”对人不是致命的，但它确实对这个曾经几近消亡的行业造成了损害。

注：

1. in question：now in consideration or under discussion

2. Accommodate：

Two decades later, however, virtual reality (vr) returned from the dead, with better images, smoother transitions and more precise controls. There were also applications beyond games. The upgraded technology has found use in social media, interior design, job training and even pain management. Moreover, a new set of companies, Oculus (now part of Facebook), htc and Sony, have come up with products that do not require a second mortgage to afford.

然而，二十年后，VR技术涅槃重生,给人们带来了更佳的画质、更流畅的切换以及更精确的控制。除了游戏之外，它还被应用到其他领域。这项升级后的技术已经应用于社交媒体、室内设计、职场培训，甚至是疼痛治疗。此外，诸如Oculus(现已被Facebook收购)、HTC以及Sony之类的公司都已经推出了搭载VR技术的产品，价格亲民。

注：
1.衍生阅读一：虚拟现实究竟是如何缓解病人痛感的

2. 衍生阅读二：看VR视频能止痛，或催生用于慢性疼痛的新兴疗法

3.什么是“First Mortgage” 和 “Second Mortgage” ?

所谓 First Mortgage 即如果你买了一栋房子，把这栋房子抵押给 A 银行做贷款，那么对 Ａ 银行而言，你的贷款便是 First Mortgage。如果你在 Ａ 银行贷完款后，同时又把你的这栋房子抵押给 Ｂ银行，希望借出更多的钱来，那么相对Ｂ银行而言，你的贷款便是Second Mortagage 了。

之所以有 Second Mortgage 的情形发生，往往是因为当你需要借出更多的钱时，原本贷款的那家银行（如Ａ银行）拒绝再贷款给你，而另一家银行如 Ｂ 银行（但通常是一些小型的财务公司，Private lender）则不介意借这笔钱给你，条件是你必须把房子也同时抵押给它。当你还不起贷款，房子被银行拍卖时，Ａ 银行的利益将会是先得到保证，因为它是 First Mortgage。在 Ａ 银行扣除你所欠的本息及与拍卖有关的费用后，剩下的钱才会再去还欠 Ｂ 银行的债务，因为它是 Second Mortgage。

Despite these improvements, though, vr has not lived up to expectations. It has done respectably, with sales in 2018 of $3.6bn, according to SuperData Research, a market research firm. But that is only 2.4% of the global market for games. Many people—and not just the usual hypesters—thought that this time around vr would become a blockbuster technology. It has not happened. Part of the reason is that cyber-sickness has not gone away. One study suggests between 25% and 40% of users still experience it.

尽管VR技术有了很多改善，但它仍然没有达到人们的期望。超级数据研究公司（SuperData Research）的数据显示：2018年VR行业的年销售额为36亿美元，这仅占全球游戏市场的2.4%。许多人（包括炒作者）认为，这一次VR会成为轰动一时的技术。但事实并非如此，部分原因是晕动症并没有完全消除，研究表明，25%-40%的用户仍然深受其害。

Dealing with this is difficult, not least because there is an argument about what triggers it in the first place. Two theories dominate. One is that users experience sensory conflict—a mismatch between what they see and what their other senses and their real-world knowledge tell them they should be experiencing. The other is that the underlying cause is individuals’ inability to control their bodies and maintain proper posture when moving around in virtual environments. To complicate matters, both hypotheses could be true.

晕动症处理起来非常困难，尤其是找出病因。目前主要有两种理论。第一种是用户感官冲突理论，人们看到的，和其他感官以及现时世界感受到的不一致。第二种是自身原因理论，即人们在虚拟环境中移动时，无法控制自己的身体和保持适当的姿态。更加复杂的是，上述两种假设可能都真实存在。

Feeling woozy

头昏眼花

Sensory conflict there certainly is. For example, when users move their heads they expect what they see to change immediately in response. But time-lags and poor graphics mean their visual input often fails to meet the brain’s expectations. Dealing with this means increasing the “frame rate” at which the virtual world is presented to a user, improving the resolution of the images and reducing the latency of response to a user’s movements. All of these require clever processing by the computer responsible for creating the illusion.

感官冲突确实存在。比如，当用户移动头部时，他们期望看到的内容能立刻随之变化，但是时间上的滞后和糟糕的图像意味着他们的视觉输入不能够满足大脑的期望。解决上述问题意味着增加虚拟世界给用户呈现画面的“帧速率”，同时还要提高图像的分辨率以及减少响应用户移动的延时。这就要求制造幻象（错觉）的电脑的巧妙处理。

Improvements in tracking what a user is doing also help. “Room scale” vr systems let people move around in the real world while perceiving similar movement in the virtual one. Following a user’s movement can be done in one of two ways. Outside-in tracking relies on external cameras observing beacons of various sorts scattered around a user’s body. Inside-out tracking is the opposite: the beacons are scattered around the room and detectors on a user’s body employ them as reference points.

提高用户动作追踪技术也有助于解决感官冲突。“空间范围” VR系统让人们在真实世界中移动，同时在虚拟世界中感知类似的动作。用户动作追踪可以通过两种方式来实现：“外->内追踪”，即通过外部相机来观察分布在用户身上信标的位置；而“内->外追踪”则相反：信标被分散置于房间各处，用户身上的传感器利用它们作为参照点来定位。

On top of all this, there is the design of the lenses that sit inside a headset in front of a user’s eyes to adjust optically for the fact that what is actually a nearby image is supposed to be some distance away. Since the shape of these lenses is fixed and the amount of adjustment required varies with what is being looked at, distortion is inevitable. But distortions are particularly noticeable when users move their eyes, says Paul MacNeilage of the University of Nevada, Reno. Some headsets therefore now track a user’s gaze and move the lenses within the headset in response.

除了以上操作之外，VR头盔在用户眼前的设置了镜片组合，通过光学调整将眼前的显示屏图像放大并拉远。由于这些镜片形状是固定的，而不同的物体要求的光学调整幅度又不同，因此失真是不可避免的。内华达大学雷诺分校的保罗·麦克尼利奇(Paul MacNeilage)指出，在用户移动双眼时，失真尤为明显。因此，现在有些VR头盔加入了眼球追踪，使镜头随使用者目光移动。

注释：
体验植入“眼球追踪”技术的VR头盔是什么感觉？ 

http://www.sohu.com/a/118078685_492152

Make the input too credible, though, and you run into a different problem—the contrast between what a user’s eyes are seeing and what the motion-sensors in his inner ear are detecting. To deal with that, some designers program in a “virtual nose”, just visible to the user, to serve as a point of reference.

而当输入画面过于逼真时，另一个问题就出现了——体验者眼见与内耳中的运动感知细胞所得不一致。为了解决这个问题，设计者在VR程序中加入了只有使用者可见的“虚拟鼻子”，将此作为位置参照点。

These tactics help. But they do not get rid of cyber-sickness entirely. That is where the second hypothesis, unstable posture, comes in. And it is one that has the virtue of offering an explanation of a mystery about the condition—why women are more likely to be affected than men.

这些技术确实有用，但并不能完全消除晕动症。由此，人们提出了第二种理论假设，即姿势不稳。这一假设在解释女性比男性更容易面临“晕动症”这一现象时相当有价值。

Thomas Stoffregen of the University of Minnesota, who has studied the matter and found women four times as susceptible as men, cites the example of driving a car to explain the unstable-posture hypothesis. When turning the steering wheel, he observes, drivers need to keep their heads oriented to the road. They need to stabilise their bodies, particularly when the car is changing direction and pushing the body in different ways. “When you spend a lot of time in cars, you get used to doing that,” he says. “It’s a skill.” But in virtual environments, where there are no forces to act as signals, people have not learned to adjust their bodies properly. They lean when the virtual car turns, but in fact they are leaning away from stability. He finds this particularly affects women, who have lower centres of gravity than men. That may cause them to sway more. And increased swaying, he has found, correlates with higher rates of cyber-sickness.

明尼苏达大学的托马斯•斯托夫雷根（Thomas Stoffregen）发现，女性得“晕动症”的概率是男性的四倍。他以驾驶汽车为例，解释了姿势不稳假说。他发现，当转动方向盘时，司机需要保持头部转向道路。尤其是当汽车改变方向（司机）身体被迫向不同的方向移动时，他们需要保持身体平衡。“开车时间久了，你就会下意识这么做。”他说道，“这是一项技能。”然而，在虚拟环境中，没有外力作为信号的情况下，人们尚未掌握合适地调整身体的方法。在虚拟的车体转向时，人们会下意识倾斜身体，但实际上这会丧失平衡。他发现，女性比男性重心低，因此更容易受到影响，摇晃得更厉害。他指出，摇晃程度越大，出现“晕动症”的几率就越高。

注：
1.女性的脂肪多堆积在臀部和大腿，通常同体重下，女性的大腿比男性粗。
虽然女性上身有胸部，但男性的上肢通常较为发达，胸廓更加粗大，上半身是差不多的。
这造成了女性的重心通常比男性偏下的情况。

2.姿势摇摆让女性更容易产生晕动症2016-12-10
http://www.sohu.com/a/121179838_213766

It is a neat idea. But Bas Rokers of the University of Wisconsin-Madison believes there is a simpler explanation for women’s experience of cyber-sickness, which is that headsets are not designed for them. For vr to work properly, sets need to be adjusted to the distance between the pupils of a user’s eyes. In one popular brand, however, Dr Rokers found that 90% of women have an interpupillary distance less than the default headset setting, and 27% of women’s eyes do not fit the headset at all.

这是一个有力的解释。 但美国威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校的巴斯·罗克斯（Bas Rokers）教授认为，对于女性晕动症有一个更简单的解释，那就是头戴式设备并不是为女性设计的。为了实现VR的效果，头盔根据使用者的瞳距来调整头盔的设置。 然而，罗克斯博士发现，任何一个流行品牌的VR头盔产品，其瞳孔间距大于90％的女性的瞳距，而27％的女性眼睛根本不适合佩戴此类头盔。

If Dr Rokers is correct, a big part of the problem of cyber-sickness might be dealt with by a small change to helmet design. If women’s rates of the complaint could be reduced to the level experienced by men, then a lot more people could enjoy vr rather than enduring it. And then, perhaps, it really might achieve its potential.

如果罗克斯博士观点正确，那么只要稍微改善头盔设计，就能很大程度解决晕动症的问题。如果可以将女性不良体验的投诉率降低到男性水平，那么更多的人就能享受VR体验，而不用经历晕动症。之后，VR或许可以真正地发挥其潜力。

翻译组：

Frank，男，小硕，经济学人的死侍

Angela，女，double major 哲学数学

Yifei，女，英专硕士，专八，catti二笔

Nikolai，子承父业，蛋糕厂员工，AKB49

Piggy，爱吃鱼，爱跳舞，爱睡回笼觉的小能猫，NUS食品系

校核组：

Lee ，爱骑行的妇女之友，Timberland粉

Helen，女，坐标武汉，职业翻译，翻硕已毕业英语二笔二口，爱好陶笛洞箫古诗词

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