[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER 1: Please
welcome Jeremy Bailenson.
He is a professor
of communication
at Stanford University
and founding director
of the Virtual Human
Interaction Lab.
And he has a new book out
called "Experience on Demand,
What Virtually Is, How It
Works, and What It Can Do."
And it is available
for sale in the back.
And now, please welcome
Jeremy Bailenson.
[APPLAUSE]
JEREMY BAILENSON: Thanks.
Hi.
So my name is Jeremy Bailenson.
And since the late
1990s, I have been
building immersive
virtual reality
and testing its
effect on the brain.
My PhD is in
cognitive psychology,
but in the year 2003, I switched
to Stanford University, where
I'm in the Department
of Communication.
Basically, what I do is
I build virtual reality,
and I test to see what
works, what doesn't work,
and we study virtual reality
as a medium the same way
you would study the newspaper
or the way you study television.
The key to virtual reality
is something called presence.
Presence is defined by Matthew
Lombard as the illusion
of non-mediation.
When VR works well, there's
no gadgets, there's no pixels,
there's no field of view.
You're just having
an experience.
So this is a lab demo
we call the virtual pit.
What happens in the virtual pit
is you're wearing the equipment
and you see a 3D
model of the room.
The floor opens up in
the 3D model of the room.
It looks just like
the physical room.
We drop a chasm.
It's about 10 meters deep.
And we lay a plank
across the chasm.
Now, let me go back
to the year 2001.
We presented at the
Federal Judicial Center
in Washington, DC, a
demonstration about
how one would use virtual
reality in the court system,
for example, to
recreate crime scenes.
And we were giving a
demo to a federal judge.
He was a large man,
probably in his late 60s.
And when he was walking across
that plank that you see,
he just took a little
baby step to his left.
Of course, we modeled
gravity, and when
he stepped off the
physical plank, visually,
he plummeted toward
the bottom of that pit.
Now, if you wanted
to save your life,
the way you would
save your life would
be to dive across to catch
the other end of that lip.
And so here we are
in Washington, DC.
This is in the year 2001.
And this federal judge,
in the physical world,
just decides to dive
at a 45 degree angle.
It gets worse.
This is my first public demo.
And we put the computer on a
table that had a sharp corner.
OK, so here is this judge
in a room full of lawyers
and he dives
towards this corner.
He was OK.
He didn't actually hurt himself.
He didn't cut himself.
But this exemplifies
something called presence.
And for most of the
people in this room
and a lot of the people watching
this video, you have done VR.
You know there's something
special about what
makes VR feel different
than other media.
At my lab at
Stanford, since 2003,
we've published
hundreds of studies
that show what works in VR from
a psychological standpoint, how
it's different than other media.
In my lab, we've got
a floor that shakes.
We've got a very
accurate tracking
system that can move
sounds around the room.
We've got haptic devices
that can move your arms.
We started working
with virtual scent.
That being said, the lab
as a physical destination
is becoming obsolete, because
some of the smart people
in this room here at
Google and other companies
are transforming
the availability
of virtual reality.
So if you look in
this image here,
on the right side of your
screen, if you go to my lab's
website, 80% of our
publications are using
these head-mounted displays.
They weigh up to five pounds.
They cost more than my car.
They're really heavy,
kind of bulky to use.
The ones that we're
using now cost
the price of an expensive
dinner, a couple hundred
dollars.
And so what we've
done is we've gone
from when I started
this work, there
was only a couple hundred
head-mounted displays,
to now we've got
tens of millions.
And that drastically
changes the questions
that we try to ask in the lab.
When I first started
virtual reality,
we thought of it
like an MRI machine--
expensive.
You needed a dedicated space.
You needed a
technician to run it.
And this transition to
now tens of millions
of people in the United States
are doing VR in their homes,
it's an important transition
in the history of the field.
So the point of this talk
is to answer the question
that my 91-year-old
grandfather had when I first
put him in virtual
reality, which is, really,
what's the point?
So a lot of people have
had this experience.
You put on VR.
It feels really cool.
But then you take it off and
you're like, OK, I did that.
And now what do I do?
And what we specialize as a lab
is focusing on the things that
make VR spectacular
and avoiding the things
that maybe aren't so good.
And what I'm going to do
today in this talk, which
is something I
haven't done before,
but I'm going to
start doing it, is
talking about both the
downsides of VR and the upsides.
I think it's important
to talk about both.
So this is an image from
the cover of my book.
And we spent a lot
of back and forth--
we spent a lot of time going
back and forth with the artist.
And the cover is a
shape that's impossible.
This shape can't
exist in the world.
However, people are doing normal
things on it, everyday things.
And virtual reality,
there's a paradox.
The brain treats it as real.
Remember, that judge
dove into nothing.
But there's no rules.
You can go back in time.
You can turn physics on and off.
You can become a
different person.
And so what I spend 12 hours a
day thinking about and studying
is, in a world in which
there are no rules--
very new to human history from
an evolutionary standpoint,
but the brain
treats it as real--
what should you do and
what should you avoid?
So I'm going to start by
talking about the downsides.
I just took this
photo 45 seconds ago
and I luckily did not get
run over on the New York City
streets here.
But in a non-funny
version of this,
there's reports out of
Moscow four weeks ago
that we have the first VR death.
A person fell through
a plate glass table
while using VR to play games.
Smartphones now are so
distracting it's causing people
to cause accidents.
VR will be no different.
Ketaki Shriram just turned in
her dissertation, which is now
available in public databases.
In her dissertation,
she put people in VR,
and she tested to see
how quick they were
to notice events outside of VR.
For example, something
touches your hands.
What she proved was that
when you're in immersive VR,
you're slower to notice and
less likely to notice things
in the outside world.
It's an important one.
We need to think about how
not to be too distracted so we
can function in the world.
Addiction-- when
social networking
feels like the best party
you've ever been to,
when online gambling feels
like going to Las Vegas, when
pornography feels like sex,
how does society function?
Reality blurring-- I'm going
to read you this quote.
"Several times during the
experiment, the participant
was confused about being
in the virtual environment
or in the real world, and mixed
certain artifacts and events
between both worlds."
This is a quote from
two German psychologists
from the University of Hamburg,
who studied a paper in 2014
where one of them watched
the other one while he
stayed in virtual reality
for 24 hours straight.
So to prepare for
this talk, I called up
Gerd Bruder, who is the
second author on this paper.
A lot of strange
things happened.
One of the things that
happened is that they actually
model light to work
in the virtual world
to correspond with the
actual time of day.
And when the virtual room got
dark, the subject got colder.
The temperature
change to the body,
self-reported, were mediated
by what they saw on VR.
It's going to be a
strange world if people
spend too much time in VR.
Simulator sickness-- we
all work hard to make sure
that our technology has got high
frame rates, low update rates.
We try not to move the camera.
But it's still something
to think about.
Over time, you
can feel fatigued.
Media modeling-- let's
avoid the desensitization
of violence debate for now.
But VR has been used to
train soldiers for decades.
Most VR labs have been
funded by research
to help our soldiers get
better at their jobs.
When the average citizen
can download software
that teaches her or
him how to do combat,
we need to think about that.
There's some issues there.
Kids are unique.
So we are about to publish
a few things that I
want to talk about today.
With Common Sense Media,
we have a report coming out
in late March that's going to
be a helpful report for parents
to think about, when is it
OK for kids to go into VR?
What types of things
should they do?
How long can they stay in there?
But my PhD student, my former
PhD student, Jackie Bailey,
is now a professor at
University of Texas.
And her dissertation research
worked with "Sesame Street."
"Sesame Street" funded
a project for us
to take four-year-olds,
five-year-olds,
and six-year-olds,
put them in VR,
and study the way they
would interact with Grover.
And so I'll show you this movie.
And you'll just get a
sense of the reaction
that kids have in VR.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- --have him do a couple
of things for us, OK?
Ready?
- Oh, hello there.
It is I, your lovable,
furry friend Grover.
- Hi.
- Get up out of your
chair and dance with us.
Follow our crazy moves.
You can do it.
- OK.
- All right.
[END PLAYBACK]
JEREMY BAILENSON:
So we've now run
north of 100 kids who are six
years or under in the lab.
And what Jackie
Bailey looks at is
she looks at psychological
processing, such as being
able to inhibit
responses, mimicry,
and social interaction.
And she's found fairly
drastic differences
where VR is more influential
on young children
than a TV version of Grover.
So it's something we
need to think about.
Now, we've talked about
five downsides of VR.
Given those downsides, what I'm
saying here today in this talk
is that in five years from
now, if the people in this room
are putting on helmets
to read their email,
then I have failed
as an evangelist.
VR is an amazing technology.
The brain treats it in a
similar way to being real.
It's something that can
take us to different places.
It's powerful.
We should save it--
save it for things that
in the physical world
meet one of four standards--
impossible, counterproductive,
rare or expensive, or dangerous.
And I'm going to go over
each of these individually.
But to sum up the take-home
argument from today,
VR is super-intense.
The brain treats it as if
it were a real experience.
Therefore, we shouldn't
use it for everything.
Let's save it for something
that meets at least one
of these standards.
Let's start with impossible.
In 2003, my lab, the first
corporate grant we got
was from Cisco.
And a woman there
named Marcia Sitosky--
Marcia said, Jeremy,
it would be really neat
if you could think about how
to use VR to teach diversity
and inclusion.
And what we did is we
built the virtual mirror.
And I'm going to
show you this video.
And be kind to it, because
I like to show history.
These graphics now
are 15 years old.
And the idea was to use VR to
induce what neuroscientists
call body transfer.
Body transfer states
that if you move
physically and
your virtual avatar
moves synchronously with you,
you see that in a mirror,
you see it in the first person.
Over time, the brain--
the part of the
brain that includes
the schema for the
self expands to include
that virtual representation.
So here in this movie,
the subject walks around.
He goes up to the mirror.
Most subjects do this
for four minutes.
I've kept it to
about 10 seconds.
He moves in the
mirror, turns his head.
After about four minutes, this
really feels like it's you.
We've got a set of
instructions that we do.
He then bends down, bends down
at the knee, and he comes up.
And he's now a woman of color.
And what we do is the next step,
we repeat the body transfer
so you really feel like
that's you in the mirror.
And then what we do is we
network a second person
into virtual reality.
So you're wearing the
body of someone else.
A second person comes
in, and then that person
proceeds to treat you
horribly based on your race,
based on your gender,
based on your age.
And what we've discovered in
about 15 years of studying this
fairly rigorously, this
is described in Chapter 3
of my book-- it's called
"Walking a Mile in the Shoes
of Another"-- is that, in
general, across these studies,
virtual reality
reduces prejudice,
changes behaviors more than
controls like watching a video
or doing role-playing
or reading case studies.
Now, I don't want to
overclaim the results.
Nothing is magic.
Nothing solves all
of our problems.
And not every single
study does VR work better
than controls on
every single measure.
But as a pattern across
over a decade of research,
VR works better than controls.
We published work in 2013,
my former student Sun Joo Ahn
is now a professor at
University of Georgia.
She had subjects come in.
Half of them imagined,
they role-played
what it would be like to
be colorblind while they
were doing a sorting test.
They had to grab objects
and sort them around.
The other half, we used
the head-mounted display
to take away their ability
to see green from red.
It was a brutally difficult,
and in fact, impossible
task to actually
do, because you had
to sort items of
different colors
and you couldn't see that well.
After the study was
over, she gave subjects
an opportunity to help
people with disabilities.
She didn't ask subjects
to self-report.
She paid them for the study.
And then said, if you
want to volunteer extra,
what you can do is
you can surf the web,
you can find websites
that would be
hard to read if you
were visually impaired,
and then you can
email the web masters
and ask them to change it.
When you become
impaired in VR, you
spend twice as much time
helping others compared
to when you imagined it.
And most of our studies look at
behavioral measures like that.
We never trust when
it comes to issues
of implicit bias and prejudice.
We don't trust self-report.
We actually watch
what people do.
Another example, Hal
Hershfield, who's
now a professor at the
Business School at UCLA,
he cared about empathy to
yourself, and in particular,
yourself in the future.
A philosopher called
Parfit has long
argued that it's really easy
to imagine pleasure soon.
It's very hard to imagine
pain in the future.
Therefore, people rarely
defer gratification.
They tend to opt
for pleasure now.
How do you get people
to push that back?
And Hal ran a series
of experiments--
it was his dissertation work--
where in the virtual
mirror, we actually
scanned your face before you
came in so you saw yourself
in the mirror.
And your face looked just
like your actual you.
We then used algorithms to age
yourself so that in the mirror,
you went from 20-something
to in your 60s or 70s.
Very intense experience.
You see yourself age
in front of your eyes.
What we would then do is
give you the opportunity
to take some money
now or give you
more money later on
if you were to put it
into a savings account.
In other words, he asked
people to defer gratification.
What Hal discovered over
a series of experiments
was that compared to just
about every control condition
you can think of, meeting your
future self in virtual reality
causes you to plan for the
future better than controls.
Now, we published
this in the "Journal
of Market Research," which
is a good academic journal.
But one of the themes of today
is watching this academic work
we've been doing for
a decade actually
scale out to the world.
And the funnest thing that
we've done with this work
is Bank of America
Merrill Lynch has built
what's called face retirement.
And they figured out a way to
use the laptops and the camera
to do a scan of your
face, and then they
age your self so that you
are about 67 years old
in this picture.
And then part of your
online banking interface,
your future self is staring
at you, every decision
that you make.
[LAUGHTER]
And your future self gets
happier the more money
you put into savings, OK?
And at Stanford,
we like win-wins.
It's OK that BAML is going
to perhaps make more money,
because there's more
money in their accounts.
20-somethings are
saving money more.
And this is important,
not just because they
are going to be impoverished
given the current trends of how
people are saving.
They're also going to live
till they're 90 or 100.
So getting people to save money
is a really important goal.
And we're working with
a number of companies
to help them encourage
young people to put money
in the bank.
Another fun application of this,
to solve a problem that's not
fun-- and fun's the wrong
word to use in this context--
the National Football
League has been very active
and working with us
as an organization
to use this technology to help
the members of their company--
or their organization,
because they're
a nonprofit-- to become better.
And Troy Vincent,
the vice president
of operations in
the NFL, he really
wants the NFL to be known
as the best place to work.
And what you're seeing
here is a screenshot
from an interview
simulator that we've built
in tandem with the NFL for--
not players-- for coaches,
executives, for owners
to basically practice
having an interview.
Why did you ask this
question to this person,
but a different question
to someone else?
Why did you look in this place?
And just like VR comes
from the flight simulator,
in interviews, we
also make mistakes.
We have a flight
simulator because mistakes
are very expensive in a plane,
but they're not expensive
when you're simulating
we should learn by doing.
And we've been
working with the NFL
to help their personnel become
better at giving interviews
and become less biased.
It's a neat process to watch
people do an interview,
and then do it again,
and to point out things
that they can do better.
Another example of
scaling this up,
at the 2016 Tribeca
Film Festival,
we premiered
"Becoming Homeless."
And Tobin Asher is
sitting right here.
He's one of the directors
of "Becoming Homeless."
It's a seven minute
journey where
you learn, in a visceral
manner, something
called the fundamental
attribution error.
So psychologist Lee
Ross from Stanford
has coined the term,
which basically states,
when something bad
happens to someone else,
we blame their character.
When something bad happens to
us, we blame the situation.
And most people do
this all the time.
How can you reverse this in the
context of becoming homeless,
meaning how can we get people
to understand that people
are homeless because
of situations,
and get them to
have more empathy?
And so what we've built is
this seven minute experience
where you lose your job.
You then lose your apartment
and you can't stay there.
You have to sell things
in your apartment.
You try living in your
car, but that doesn't work.
You then try to sleep
on a bus and you
have harassment on the bus.
It's a very intense journey.
But more importantly, we have
run thousands of subjects
through this now.
Thousands of subjects
where we have people
do VR or a control condition.
And what we give
them is a petition.
They take the helmet
off, sign this petition.
It's an actual
proposition in many cases.
Are you willing to have your
own personal taxes increased
if it can go to supporting
affordable housing?
And in a paper we're going
to publish quite soon,
in a paper that's already
been accepted for presentation
at a conference, so
it's been peer reviewed,
compared to control
conditions, VR
causes more people to
sign this petition.
But what I'm really
excited about scaling up
is when we leave
here, Tobin's going
to be hard at work,
because tomorrow,
this is going to be released
for the world on Steam.
And so we're really excited just
to take what the lab has built
and to give it to
people for free.
Let's go to the next example,
which is counterproductive.
This bucket of--
remember, we're talking
about physical experience,
things that in the real world
would be counterproductive.
Hence, let's do them in VR.
And I'm going to
focus on conservation.
And one of my academic
heroes is Dr. Jane Lubchenco.
She was the head of the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration for four
years under President Obama.
In that four-year window,
she saw more natural disaster
than in any four-year
window in US history.
Scientists are in consensus
that the frequency and intensity
of these weather events
are due to climate change.
But of course, there's many
people, both in our government
and among our citizens,
who don't believe this.
And so this quote
from Dr. Lubchenco--
"when people directly
experience something,
they see it in a
different light."
And I interviewed
her for the book.
And she told all
these amazing stories.
At NOAA, her job was, when
there was a natural disaster,
to go down and to help
the people who had been
hurt by the natural disaster.
And she's got some amazing
stories of lawmakers
who were climate change
deniers, but when
natural disaster hit their
city, they become believers.
In other words, the
horrors and the experience
of droughts and floods that
have ravaged their cities
have caused them to
become believers.
But remember, in virtual
reality, disaster is free, OK?
We can feel a disaster
but not get hurt.
And so the first study
that we published here
examined a phenomenon called
toilet paper consumption.
And it turns out there is
an article written in 2009
by Leslie Kaufman for "The
New York Times," if you use
that soft, fluffy toilet
paper that we all love,
that paper is made
from non-recycled pulp.
About half of that comes
from second growth forest.
10% of that comes
from virgin trees.
So the article is
written brilliantly,
but nothing changes.
In San Francisco, where
I live in the Bay Area,
it's the hippiest, crunchiest
place in the country,
and many stores don't sell
recycled toilet papers.
The ones that do sell it,
you have to hunt and peck.
So how do we change behavior?
So we ran a study, three
groups of subjects.
One group read a beautifully
written narrative
of what it would be
like to cut down a tree.
The second group
saw a video shot
from the shoulder
of a lumberjack.
The third put on the goggles
and had a haptic device
that gave them touch feedback.
And they actually had
to cut down two trees.
And then after the trees fell,
my lab has a floor that shakes,
the tree falls and it
booms their feet up.
Really intense experience.
In fact, I get phone
calls quite often.
Someone will call
me up and they say,
Jeremy, I went to that
toilet paper aisle yesterday
and I thought about you.
And I say, that's just fine.
But we tend not to trust
self-report, though.
So in our experiments,
we did two things.
We asked people
before and after,
are you going to
conserve paper more?
Everybody says yes, whether
you read the narrative,
saw the video, or did the VR.
But we also looked at
their actual paper use.
And the only change
occurred with the VR group.
They used 20% less paper.
So the big idea here is VR
gives you an experience.
The brain treats it as real.
And experience
changes our behavior.
But if I were to
teach the people
in this room about
deforestation by forcing
you to cut down big trees, that
would be a silly way to do it.
VR gives you the
best of both worlds.
The next project I
want to talk about,
because I'm hugely
impressed what Google's done
throughout its history
about education,
I've worked closely with the
Expeditions team for quite
some time, is education.
And I want to talk about
a very special place that
has been worked on by my marine
science colleague, Fio Micheli.
This is a reef off of
the island of Ischia,
which is off of Naples, Italy.
And this island, this
reef has volcanic vents
that seep pure carbon dioxide.
This is special, because
most of the time that there's
underwater volcano and
underwater volcanic vents,
it seeps methane or sulfur
or other bad chemicals
that you can blame the
destruction on the reef
on the bad chemicals.
This is a pure area where
you have CO2 coming out
of the bottom of the ocean.
And what you're looking
here is a picture
of what's called
ocean acidification.
So most smart adults have not
heard of ocean acidification.
Jane Lubchenco calls it
global warming's evil twin.
There's been papers
published, hundreds of them,
in the best journals,
"Science" and "Nature,"
yet most adults don't
know what it is.
When oceans absorb CO2--
about a third of the
CO2 produced by humans
get absorbed by the ocean--
the water becomes more acidic.
The pH level goes down.
The same way that when you drink
seltzer, which has CO2 in it,
it's a little more tangy, the
water becomes more acidic.
When the water
becomes more acidic,
what you see on your right
side of the screen happens.
Coral dies and algae thrives.
And the entire food
web under the ocean
gets destroyed, because
the corals and other types
of animals that support
the ecosystem get replaced
by a small number of species.
So what you're looking
at is a screenshot
of how all of our
oceans are going
to look if our oceans continue
to absorb human-produced CO2.
But most people
haven't heard of this.
And it would be
counterproductive for me to fly
schoolkids and lawmakers to
this small reef in Ischia--
it's not much bigger
than a soccer field--
in order to learn this lesson.
So we work tirelessly with Fio
Micheli, the marine scientist,
and Roy Pea, who's an
educational technologist,
to build an eight-minute
journey where you leverage all
of the educational techniques
that Roy Pea has championed--
experiential learning, all
sorts of perspective-taking.
You become a scientist.
You do species count.
You get to travel through time.
You really experience what
ocean acidification is.
And what we can demonstrate--
we've published a number
of papers here--
the first thing is
learning efficacy.
We've put it in high schools.
We've put it in college classes.
Simply put, people learn
well from virtual reality.
It's a good starting point
to get a lot of data on that.
There's also
motivation to learn,
which is-- this is a screenshot
from the 2016 Tribeca Film
Festival, where we premiered
the Stanford Ocean Acidification
Experience.
It's an arcade that's open
for about 10 hours a day.
Jane Rosenthal, the genius
that put this together.
It's an amazing, amazing
set of experiences
that people pay to come to.
We had a line of sometimes
up to 100 adults waiting
for up to an hour for about
10 hours a day for seven days
straight to learn
about chemistry.
And you don't see
that for textbooks.
And maybe it's a novelty
thing and it'll wear off,
but I've been doing VR for 20
years and the shock and awe
for me has not worn off.
So I do think the
motivation piece will stay.
We've done a lot of work to
do this to inform policy.
So we did a briefing
at the US Senate,
where we had Senators and
Congresswomen and Congressmen,
in addition to
their staffers which
you're seeing here in the
picture, experience ocean
acidification.
And there was really
two functions of this.
One was teaching the lawmakers
about ocean acidification.
But for those who knew
about acidification,
we were teaching them about VR.
And it was a really
neat process.
We just came back
from Palau, which
I'm not going to go
into too much detail,
because I have limited
time in this talk, where
we did a similar briefing
for Palauan lawmakers.
But we actually created
a demo, a targeted demo,
to show the lawmakers
how climate change was
affecting the reefs in Palau.
And it was a really
neat experience
to watch the VR
demos that we gave
as a briefing to
the lawmakers become
part of the policy decisions
and the policy conversations.
But most importantly,
really happy that it's free
and that we're giving it away.
At Stanford, we've got a history
with MOOCs, which is can we
democratize learning materials?
And I believe even more than
a MOOC, a seven-minute journey
where you learn something
new and exciting
is going to really transform
a lot of education,
because very few people
get to have labs,
really good labs, or
really good field trips.
And I'm not saying we
should replace actual field
trips with VR.
I'm saying we should have
field trips much more often.
Let's move to
expensive and rare.
And this is going to be the
story of learning and training.
And it starts with Derek Belch.
Derek Belch took my Virtual
People class in the year 2005.
He was a field goal kicker
for the Stanford team.
After class he said, Jeremy,
can we use VR to train athletes?
I said Derek, it's
a brilliant idea,
but the tech's not ready yet.
Come back in 10 years.
10 years later, Derek
came back to the lab.
He got his master's
thesis with me
while he was an assistant coach
on the Stanford football team.
And he convinced
coach David Shaw,
another brilliant
forward-thinking person,
to give us away five minutes
of practice time on a Monday,
where we would film
in spherical video.
Back in 2013, it was really
hard to do spherical video well.
And our defense would
pretend to be the team we're
going to play that Saturday.
And they would throw at us
really complicated blitz
packages and different
defensive looks.
The quarterback would go
to the line of scrimmage,
and he'd have to do
one of three things.
He'd let it roll, which
is keep the original play.
He'd kill, kill, kill,
which is go to the next play
down the queue.
Or he would ask a running back
to move to pick up a block.
So recognize a pattern,
make a decision,
communicate that decision.
After three weeks,
it was working
so well that David
Shaw decided to make
it mandatory for practice.
The Stanford team
outperformed that season.
I would never claim that,
but Coach Shaw, as well as
Kevin Hogan, our quarterback,
highlighted this as one
of the many tools that helped
them do well that season.
So it is a really
neat thing to watch.
Derek graduates January 2, 2015.
And like many Stanford
students, he forms a startup.
It's called STRIVR.
And what Derek has
succeeded in doing
is transforming the
way athletes train.
The first few months after
starting this company,
he thought he would have
maybe a team or two.
He signs five NFL teams
to multi-year contracts,
about a dozen college
teams, and now this
is just a sampling of some of
the teams and companies that
are using this.
It is transforming the way
that people are training.
And the point here
is not that we want
to replace actual training.
It's just an extra
tool that you can use
to get more mental repetitions.
It helps you learn faster.
It helps you learn in ways
that are less dangerous.
Now, in terms of scaling out,
because it's really exciting
to watch companies like
Google build things
that can allow
everyone to do VR,
I want to talk about Walmart.
I'm going to read
you this quote.
"From our test, we've seen that
associates who go through VR
training retain what they've
learned in those situations
better than those who haven't.
Because of the
promising results,
we'll be rolling out
this training to all 200
of our Academy facilities
by the end of 2017.
That means the over
140,000 associates who
will graduate from
academics each year
will have VR as an integral
part of that experience."
That's from a vice
president at Walmart.
The story of Walmart
is, we were demoing
Arkansas' football trainer
to someone from Walmart.
He said, huh,
recognize a pattern?
Making a decision and
communicating that decision
sounds like part
of everybody's job.
And what we did is we built a
VR training demo for Walmart
and we put it in one
single training academy.
Walmart has 200 of them.
Any Walmart employee
can get in their car
and drive in a day to get there.
They do a boot camp where
they spend a week learning.
We put VR in one.
You're probably
all thinking, well,
what do you learn
in VR for Walmart?
One example is holiday rush.
All these people running at you,
asking you to answer questions
and screaming at you.
Or another example is finding
safety hazards in the room.
There's actually a
lot of use cases.
So we started in one
of these academies.
Very good qualitative data.
We then went to 30 of them
and paired the 30 academies
using it to 30 who
were not yet using it
so we could run a
controlled study.
Very good quantitative
data at scale.
We are now in all of them.
And I can say--
I'm allowed to say,
in the year 2017,
over 150,000 people got
better at their jobs
using virtual reality
and similar techniques,
just to look around and get
extra mental repetitions.
And what goes into
it is the motivation.
It's fun to do.
The efficacy-- it's a
better way to train,
because you feel
like you're there.
The final one I'm
going to talk about--
and we're short on time,
so I'll be brief on this--
is we should use
VR for things that
are dangerous in
the physical world.
And one of the most dangerous
things that all of us
do far too often is drive.
Cars killed 40,000
people last year,
1.3 million people worldwide.
We're going to
look back someday,
and can you believe that we
all got in these metal boxes,
followed other people
in metal boxes,
and spent an hour each
day going back and forth?
And we're not quite there where
a face-to-face meeting video
conference doesn't work.
I've been tirelessly
working, and my colleagues,
on trying to come up with
a set of nonverbal features
that are sufficient
enough to do what I call
the virtual handshake,
feeling like you're really
with someone.
We've got a lot of
work to do there.
But you know my plea
to the brilliant people
in this room and
the brilliant people
watching this video
is, let's make VR work.
I don't want to get rid of
face to face conversation.
Go to that party,
see your loved ones.
But we don't need to
drive to work every day
to clack on a computer
and then drive home.
To sum up, Justice Alito
had a concurring opinion
in a famous court case in 2011.
In the Supreme Court
case, the US Supreme Court
ruled that free speech
trumped video game violence.
Meaning that any video
game, no matter how violent,
is free speech.
And I am a full
believer in free speech.
I'm very supportive
of the Supreme
Court, in that people get to do
art, and we have free speech.
That's what makes
America so special.
Alito wanted to flag
something, though.
He wrote what's called a
concurring opinion, which
is he agreed with the majority,
but he wanted to flag an issue.
And it was about
immersive virtual reality.
And in fact, Alito quotes my
last book, "Infinite Reality."
And what he says is that
I believe in free speech
and it trumps other
concerns, but there's
something different about VR.
There's something about it,
which it feels really real.
And the same
standards that we've
been applying to normal 2D media
might be a little different.
So I don't come on stage
today to give you an answer.
I do agree with Justice
Alito that there's
something different about VR.
Free speech trumps
all, and we've
got to figure out how
to meld those two.
The take home standard that
I've come up with for me,
personally, and my friends and
family that call me up and they
say, well, what
should I do in VR,
VR is meant for things that you
cannot do in the real world.
That's why it's there.
But if it's something that you
wouldn't do in the real world,
that you'd feel
bad about yourself,
that you wouldn't want your
friends to know you did,
maybe that's not something
you should be doing in VR.
So on that note, I look
forward to your questions
and thank you for
your attention.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: Thanks for coming in.
JEREMY BAILENSON: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: This caught my
eye because, as a consumer,
I read about VR.
I hear about it a lot.
But it still seems very
kind of at arm's distance
as a consumer.
Your arguments make
perfect sense to me,
but what's the tipping
point for VR to become more,
I guess, accessible
for the consumer?
Like what's the iPhone of VR?
JEREMY BAILENSON: So there's
two things I'll say here.
The first is when most people
think about VR consumption,
if you imagine a graph
where the x-axis is years
and the y-axis is
numbers purchased,
some people are a little bit
sad at the slope of that curve.
But for VR people that have
been doing this for 20 years,
if you pull out and you extend
that x-axis, what you see
is this, whoop,
really intense curve.
And personally, I'm very
comfortable at the rate
that VR has been expanding.
And perhaps what's-- we
had a death in Russia,
according to Moscow news.
I'm thrilled we haven't had
one in the United States.
I'm just absolutely
delighted by it.
And I like the pace
that we're going on.
We need to learn a lot
about this technology
before all of us are walking
around in these goggles all day
long.
So my first answer is, I
know that you work at Google
and you want to reach people.
That's what you guys do.
I'm really comfortable
with where we're at.
The second answer to your
question, more functionally,
in my opinion, the
roadblock in VR is content.
And if you think
about how long it
took to get to "Citizen Kane"
from the first moving picture,
it took some time.
And we just haven't
nailed content yet.
There's no reason to
be in VR for that long.
And so if we give
somebody demos,
it's an hour-long demo session.
Our longest one is
five or six minutes.
They do a lot of them.
They're about a minute long.
The content is not
quite there yet
to justify you clearing
out a room in your garage
and putting in this hardware.
So you have to
make great content.
Then people will
buy the widgets.
AUDIENCE: So I'm thinking
back to that original anecdote
that you opened up with
about the judge who
stepped off the plank
and was driving at the--
I would be that guy.
I haven't been in that
many VR simulations.
You've been in
countless, I'm sure.
Does it wear off-- the
reality wear off a bit?
Do you kind of get used to it so
you don't react that intensely?
JEREMY BAILENSON:
I'll tell you a story.
So with the plank
demos, back when
I was actually doing
code-- and now I'm
just a figurehead that
talks all the time.
When I was programming my own
pits and building the actual--
carving out the floor and
laying that plank down,
I got a little bit
desensitized to that one.
And I was able to kind
of jump off and play,
because I'd spent so
much time building it.
When I visited one of
my academic heroes--
his name is Fred Brooks, he's
a computer science professor
at the University of North
Carolina Chapel Hill--
he had a pit that just had--
it wasn't the graphics.
It was the tracking, was
a higher update rate,
more accurate, lower latency.
And it was my plan to
show off in front of him
and just kind of
jump off the pit.
But I was terrified
and I couldn't do it.
He put a napkin in my hand and
my napkin coated with sweat.
To close the loop
on that, I went
to go visit a company called
Nomadic in San Rafael.
They run these arcade systems.
And I have to say,
they've got a better pit
than I have in my lab.
It's the pit-- there's an
actual wooden plank there.
And it's really-- they
warp it so that it wobbles.
And they track the wobbles
so you see it in VR.
And they've got wind going.
But because of my
lesson with Fred Brooks,
I promised myself
that I would never not
step off a plank again.
And so I was able
to overcome that.
But it still got me.
It hurt for me to do--
I wanted to show
off to these guys,
and I was the first
person in the history that
ever stepped off their plank.
But I had to really
tell myself to do it.
AUDIENCE: So it
sounds like it may
be very specific
to the environment
that you've gotten
very accustomed to.
JEREMY BAILENSON: So
one of the questions
I get in VR is, what's the
effect of multiple doses?
We're just starting
to get a little handle
on how long effects last
with longitudinal studies.
And about five or six really
rigorous studies will tell you
that the effects of VR, of
these treatments for empathy,
et cetera, if you look,
say, two months later, it's
still outperforming the other.
So we're starting to
get a handle on that.
But in terms of the number
of doses, doing VR 10 times,
50 times, the one data
point we have historically
is for the folks that
use VR to treat phobias.
So before there was this
consumer revolution,
there was a lot of
brilliant people
who were using VR to teach
fear of public speaking,
fear of heights,
fear of spiders.
And it typically-- with
systematic desensitization,
what you have there
is people come back
for multiple sessions.
And so, at least with
those data points,
it's still intense for them
over time in the fear context.
But your larger point,
which is all of these things
are going to matter
in what you're doing,
I totally agree with.
I try not to overgeneralize.
Sometimes I do, but--
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
JEREMY BAILENSON: Thanks.
AUDIENCE: Thank you for coming.
Curious about-- so you just
mentioned about your optimism
in VR generally.
Can you talk about that,
vis-a-vis optimism for AR
and the spectrum from mixed all
the way to real and virtual.
JEREMY BAILENSON: So
augmented reality,
for those that don't
know, is you're
wearing normal
glasses that let light
in from the physical room, and
you can overlay digital stuff
on top so that
everyone in this room,
I could see a name tag
floating over your head.
My lab is tunnel
visioned on AR right now.
We have two brilliant
grad students.
That's all they're doing.
When I started doing VR
research, it was in 1999.
It was new, but there were
still 300, maybe 500 published
studies on psychology of VR.
When you get to AR, there are
some studies about usability,
about kind of
perceptual features.
But the kind of work
that I do, which
is what is the
effect of me being
in this room, real
people, and then
there's a virtual
person right here,
how does that change the way
that I exist in the world,
there is almost nothing.
So my collaborator,
Greg Welch at University
of Central Florida, he
and I have collaborated.
We just published our
first study, which asks,
what happens when an AR, a
virtual human breaks physics?
She walks through
chairs and stuff?
How that affects how you deal
with that person later on.
The work we're doing in my lab
right now, there's just so--
there's are so many
questions to address.
We're kind of sprinting
on this because there's
no academic research.
We're asking the
question, if you
think about what people
are going to do in AR,
it's not going to
be mundane stuff.
In other words, we're
not going to bother
to go into AR to do
things that are boring.
You're going to do
really intense things.
That's what you do
in VR, good or bad.
If you go to your
own life and think
about the best thing that's
ever happened to you,
or the worst thing that's
ever happened to you,
you can really
imagine that place.
And if you go to
the place, you're
going to have some emotion.
And so the questions
we're answering now
are, when you have an
event occur to you in AR,
later on, how do you feel
about the space itself?
Because you're
going to see people
doing stuff in physical
spaces that are compelling.
And how does that affect the
way we live in the world?
And so I'm tunnel-visioned
on this as a lab.
We just don't know that much.
Yeah, thanks.
Hi.
AUDIENCE: Hi, thanks.
I have a question.
So how do you see
the future of VR
playing in people doing work?
How does the VR affect
people, everyday work?
JEREMY BAILENSON: So where I
can answer with great confidence
is in the training.
So we talked about
the Walmart example.
Fidelity is using VR to help
its people in call centers
have better empathy with the
people that they're talking to
on the phone, so that
they can basically
beam into their living rooms.
I think that's one aspect.
Training people to be
better at their jobs.
I truly believe the
commuting one is--
it's going to be
transformational.
Now, it's only going to
work if VR is good enough
that we can feel this magic,
what we call social presence.
But the money
companies will save
because you don't have
to fly someone halfway
across the planet for a
one-hour long meeting,
you don't lose that hour
on each end of the commute.
I think it's going
to be spectacular.
But I will say, I always
try to be careful,
there's just a
lot of things that
don't need to be in VR, right?
So most of your
daily work is going
to be just fine on the computer.
You don't have to
gratuitously stick it in VR.
And a nice data
point here is when
we went through the
Walmart handbook--
they've got this
amazing handbook on how
to train at Walmart and
how to do your job better.
We had choices of hundreds
and hundreds of anecdotes.
We didn't build hundreds.
We built a dozen,
because we wanted
to focus on the things that
are going to be great in VR.
For example, things that
require you to look around,
things that might be
dangerous to do in the real--
there's things that work
in VR, and it's really not
for everything.
I hope if there's any lesson
that comes out of this talk,
I do not believe we should
use VR for everything.
Let's save it for
the things that work.
So the two answers to
your question-- training
and productivity, because
you can take more meetings
and you don't lose a commute.
AUDIENCE: I agree with a lot
of what you're saying about
what's possible in
VR, as well as what
you said in relation
to film, how
it took a certain amount of time
before you have a masterpiece
type of a film.
I was wondering if your lab
offers grants to content
creators in that
realm, specifically
in relation to film or art, or
if you know of any in this way.
Because I agree with
you that it does--
the level of it rising
depends on content creation,
is what you said.
So I'm wondering if there
are any possibilities in that
that you would give
to independent artists
or filmmakers.
JEREMY BAILENSON: So what
my lab does, first of all,
is we give pro bono advice to
just about any artist who asks.
We give free tours to people who
are in the Bay Area that want
to get the deep dive on
what works and what doesn't.
I'm happy to share
with you the syllabus.
We pioneered a
course at Stanford
called Immersive Journalism.
And this was-- it wasn't
just about journalism,
it was about storytelling.
And it was-- what we
did in the class is
we didn't do technology,
we had a bunch
of really smart storytellers.
There was actually a woman
named Geri Migielicz and Janine
Zacharia that
co-taught the class.
Really amazing storytellers.
We just critiqued everything
that had ever been done and we
pulled things that
worked and that didn't.
And I'm happy to share
that syllabus with you.
AUDIENCE: I think
this is a great case
study, what you're saying.
What I was asking was, say
for example, I'm an artist.
JEREMY BAILENSON: Yes.
AUDIENCE: And I'm
a content creator
and I know how to create a
story with empathy or something.
How do I get a grant to do that?
That was sort of the question.
Or if I know somebody
who can do something
with virtual reality
that hasn't been done,
like you talked about,
the small form of this--
about homelessness,
some other situations.
How does an artist get a grant
to do something like this?
JEREMY BAILENSON:
Yeah, so I'll answer--
AUDIENCE: But not from
like a company perspective.
Like something like Google,
I'm thinking outside of.
JEREMY BAILENSON: Yeah, so
I'll answer what I know,
because I'm a very bad artist
and a decent social scientist.
The foundations have been
really supportive to me.
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation,
Gordon and Betty Moore
Foundation, Mayfield
Foundation-- or sorry,
the Mayday Foundation.
If your content aligns
with their topics,
there's good money for that.
And you can make small money
go a long way these days.
The other thing I
would think about
is the large organizations.
So my lab, I have
hosted visits from,
just this year, probably
a dozen nonprofits,
ranging from Planned Parenthood
to the World Wildlife
Foundation to the Red Cross.
They're all looking for
virtual reality simulations
that can help them
get their message out.
That being said, they all tend
to have their own storytellers,
so they tend to be looking
for support on the code side.
However, I truly believe
that creating good narrative
is the roadblock
in a lot of ways.
So I would just ask
early and often,
and have a thick
skin on the nos.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
JEREMY BAILENSON: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Apologies in
advance if you actually
do answer this in
your book, but so when
you talk about using
your technology
to show people what the
effects of climate change
or deforestation are by
having them cut down a tree
or experience a single
natural disaster,
how does that scale
up from, OK, I
cut down a tree to, oh
my god, we are actually
getting rid of rainforest?
Because one person cutting
down one tree on its own
doesn't seem like it
would have that effect.
JEREMY BAILENSON: So one of
my appointments at Stanford--
I'm a Senior Fellow at the Woods
Institute for the Environment.
And we think a lot
about how to communicate
climate change in
the sense that it is
frustrating that one person--
we can do better but we
can't solve the problem.
And the two answers
I have to that are,
one is, it's still
good to do better.
And changing the car you drive
and what you eat every day
can make some type
of a difference.
The second answer is
that I can talk about
under the previous
administration,
I spent a lot of time
working with USAID.
And these were building
virtual simulations
to target leaders in
the developing nations,
because the truth is,
climate change is here now,
and we have to
focus on adaptation.
And so we do a lot
of work on, you
know what, Palau, they can't
reduce their carbon footprint
and expect that to
change anything.
They only have 20,000 people.
They can stop the
commercial farming
to prevent runoff
that kills the reefs.
They can regulate commercial
fishing a little bit more.
AUDIENCE: Right, but
I guess my question
is more from a
psychological standpoint.
Like for your Palau example,
you can actually show them,
do an eight-minute scuba
dive, that with time lapse,
the effects of their current
environment over time.
But one person cutting
down one tree in that one
restricted
simulation, that's not
going to show the full effect
in the immersive environment.
So that's my question.
How does that scale
up psychologically?
JEREMY BAILENSON: Yes, so the
two answers to that are, that's
why we--
so the early work had to give
me the confidence as a scientist
to know that this stuff
actually, as a medium,
is effective.
And so a lot of
that early work--
that tree study, again,
is over a decade old now--
is just to prove
to myself that it's
OK to actually go to larger,
upscale type simulations.
The second answer
is, I don't think VR
is great for the macro stuff.
And so, you know, on
the climate change side,
when you've got to learn about
all these complex systems,
where you're seeing how
weather patterns-- use
a computer for that.
VR's not for everything, and
the computers work really well.
The best online
learning materials,
in my humble opinion,
is Chris Dede's--
he's a Harvard psychologist.
He's got something called
EcoMUVE and River City.
And he's-- hundreds of
thousands of students.
And he's shown real differences
in learning from that.
And it's a complicated
thing where
you're running experiments
and talking to other people.
And they're in there for hours.
You don't want to
be in VR for hours.
So for the macro
stuff, I don't want
to cheapen the science into
kind of this aha moment that's
a five-minute thing.
The way that I think about
it, let's do the macro stuff.
You learn these
complex relationships.
Then go in VR and experience
the intensity of it.
AUDIENCE: Oh, OK, I see.
So it's more about making people
feel like they are respond--
they are part of the
problem directly.
JEREMY BAILENSON:
Well, I think we
should continue to talk about
everything it's good for.
So with the leaders-- that's
why I brought up Palau--
this was not for the citizens.
This was for the 26 people who
were making the laws in Palau.
And that scales, right?
So when it comes to
citizens-- so when
I worked with the
USAID, we were trying
to brainstorm where we can
be helpful to give leaders
of countries more
information to make
better informed decisions
about their climate policies,
or their adaptation policies.
AUDIENCE: Now, what
about the opposite issue
that, for instance, in the
empathy at the beginning,
the opposite issue
would be if somebody
sees that their
reflection has changed,
what happens if the shock
of seeing that change
cancels out the rest
of the experience?
JEREMY BAILENSON: So we pilot
test a lot with this stuff.
And we make mistakes early
on with small samples.
When we ever present
a study, it's
usually because we've
failed a dozen times.
And what we end
up presenting is--
not from a statistical sense,
for those who pay attention
to p-hacking-- in informal
pilot studies qualitatively,
we do designing and we find
out what is going on not cause
that shock to take you
out of the experience.
AUDIENCE: OK, so
I would just have
to get a little bit
more nuanced insight
into exactly what you did.
And I assume that
book provides that.
JEREMY BAILENSON:
Yes, however no.
This is in its infancy.
I'm presenting my
work and I'm trying
not to present it as if
we've discovered everything.
Most academic fields have
got hundreds if not thousands
of people converging on a topic.
In the history of VR social
science, there's about four
of us.
AUDIENCE: And I
actually appreciate
the talk for that attitude
that you present it with.
JEREMY BAILENSON: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
JEREMY BAILENSON:
Appreciate your questions.
SPEAKER 1: All right,
thank you all for coming.
And let's please thank
our speaker as well.
[APPLAUSE]
