Virtual Reality Gives Wheelchair Students Realistic--but Safe--Lessons : Therapy: Computer program that helps train fighter pilots and tank drivers is helping the disabled learn how to navigate and communicate more effectively.

When 5-year-old Christopher Cobbs straps himself into his electric wheelchair, his mother doesn’t worry that he’ll get dirty plowing through the mud or injured in an accident.

With his small hand gripping the joystick and his eyes locked on tiny TV screens inside a headset, Christopher zooms through a computer-generated world of virtual reality, learning to pilot a wheelchair the same way an astronaut learns to land the space shuttle.

“Put me on speed!” said Christopher, whose cerebral palsy keeps him from walking but not from playing Nintendo. “I want to be running through the mud!”

Christopher’s mother, Nora Cobbs, drives him 135 miles from Grants Pass to practice on the virtual reality rig. He’s one of a dozen children enrolled in a pilot program at the Oregon Research Institute, which is financed by a $600,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

“On his real one, if he crashes, he’ll get hurt,” Cobbs said. “They should have thought of this a long time ago. It’s going to help a lot of kids.”

The military has been using virtual reality for years to teach jet pilots and tank drivers, and even to stage mock battles. Now the technology is helping the disabled navigate and communicate more effectively.

“I think VR is going to be most powerful as a training device. What it will do is take us places we haven’t been before, in ways we haven’t been before,” said Harry J. Murphy, director of the Center on Disabilities at California State University at Northridge.

At Loma Linda University Hospital in California, researchers put data gloves like those used in virtual reality games on patients who have lost their speech, so they can talk with simple hand movements translated by a computer.

“This is rock ‘n’ roll science at its finest,” said medical student David Warner. “This is a technology that, if we don’t take control of it, Nintendo and Sega will control our future.”

Dean Inman, director of the Oregon wheelchair-training project, was frustrated in trying to teach children with cerebral palsy to drive motorized wheelchairs in the real world.

“For kids who have never moved around before independently, these are brand-new concepts,” said Inman. “They don’t understand poles, doors, hallways. They don’t have any depth perception to speak of, because they’ve never moved themselves around and had to learn about environmental cues.

“They learn to be helpless, because people carry them from place to place,” he added. “Many times they simply won’t do it. We were left chewing on granite when we had a motivational problem.”

Inman had been tinkering with a computer world for wheelchairs projected on a normal TV screen when his wife came home from a conference on virtual reality and urged him to try that. The state Education Department gave him a three-year grant.

For about $30,000 Inman was able to buy the hardware and software to create the virtual reality world Christopher drives through. He sits on a motorized wheelchair that is mounted on a set of rollers wheelchair athletes use to train indoors, letting the wheels spin and giving a sense of movement beyond the video images.

Wearing a baseball cap to help the headset fit, Christopher sees through tiny TV screens mounted in front of each eye, making the computer-generated images three-dimensional.

When he bumps into something, the wheelchair jolts to a stop. When he hits the mud, he goes slower. When he runs off the edge of the world, he flies through the sky until he finds the ground again.

Designer Ken Loge is creating four different worlds of increasing difficulty, each with a pair of toes at the bottom of the screen. They go from a simple floor with black and white tiles, where there are no walls to bump into, to a street crossing with traffic lights and passing cars.

Though the computer images have a cartoon quality, Christopher said he feels as if he is in a real world.

“One of the questions is how real does it have to look for it to work?” said Inman.

Learning to drive a wheelchair is just the beginning.

Inman is seeking a grant to use virtual reality to teach biology, chemistry and physics to children with disabilities.

“It’s just an idea whose time has come,” Inman said.