- It's been referred to as the Oasis,
the Metaverse, and the Matrix.
You may have heard people talking
as the hottest new tech innovation
since the internet.
I mean, now, we can actually walk
in someone else's shoes.
Maybe you're in a war-torn
village somewhere,
or swimming through an ocean reef,
or maybe you just wanna be really
scared watching a horror
movie. (ghost screams)
VR really hit it big in 2014.
That's when Facebook acquired Oculus,
the company that created the Oculus Rift.
Since then, 360 videos
pretty much exploded.
VR fans say that it
creates an in-real-life
sense of being there,
and this sense of reality
is why some have dubbed
it the Empathy Machine.
Empathy is that feeling
when you understand
and share someone else's experiences
almost as if they're your own.
But can VR really make us more empathetic?
Research shows that
even regular old movies
can change our brain chemistry,
making us care more about others.
For example, simple
stories can cause the brain
to produce the stress
hormone cortisol and the
love hormone oxytocin,
and this can make us want
to donate money to a cause or help others,
a technique advertisers know all too well.
Ads often hook you in with
those compelling stories,
and just when you're
emotionally invested, BAM!
They convince you to buy their
product or fork over your money.
Stanford's Virtual Reality Lab is
studying how VR affects empathy.
To get an inside look
at this, we took a trip
to the lab and met up with Tobin Asher.
- What we study here are the psychological
and behavioral effects of virtual reality.
We want to know how VR
affects individuals,
not only when they're in
a headset in the virtual
environment, but also once they've left
the virtual world,
reentered the real world.
How do these effects stay with them?
So, you're gonna become a superhero.
- [Myles] Aw yeah.
- Now, we would tell participants
that there had been an emergency.
The city had been evacuated, but
there was a child left behind,
and your job would be to fly around,
find the child, and save the child's life.
All right, you ready?
- Yeah.
- Okay, you're gonna put your hands
above your head to take
off. (wind blowing)
So, we had participants in
two different conditions.
We had the superhero condition,
that's where you're currently in,
flying around, trying to
save the child's life,
and then, the other group of participants
were in a condition in which they
were flying around the city as
if they were in a helicopter.
After the experiment was supposedly over,
so the participants were outside of VR
at this point, the experimenter faked
an accident, they fumbled
with the equipment,
knocked some items off
a table, and we measured
the reaction times of the participants.
What we found was that the participants
in the superhero
condition were much faster
to help and more thorough
in their helpfulness
than those in the helicopter condition.
So, both in VR, but we find that one
group of participants ends up being
more helpful, and so, this is really
speaking to the importance of the
experience that you
have in virtual reality
and how this can shape
your behavior later on.
This is one study of many, and there's
always more research
to be done, and I will
never claim that virtual reality is the
thing that absolutely
makes people empathetic
or is a magical tool that will make
people empathetic or works every time,
but we do find, in very
specific instances,
when used well, that
we can see differences
in the way that virtual reality
affects people than other mediums.
- So, research shows VR does uniquely
provoke empathy, but will VR really
deliver on all these promises?
These high school students from Baltimore
are using VR to tell their stories.
They've been working with Digital Promise,
a non-profit that has a mission to connect
high school students with VR technology.
- [Student] I can do this.
- [Male Student] You'll
never have any friends here.
- [Female Student] I'm
gonna find you later.
- Our story, Breaking Barriers, is about
how anxiety can alter your
perception of reality.
Our protagonist is new to a school,
and figures are coming up to her
saying negative comments, but essentially,
you realize that it is
just her imagination.
It's all in her head.
- I suffer from anxiety in a
lot of social circumstances.
I brought a lot of ideas from how I feel
to actually make it feel more realistic.
- [Female Student] Why are you here?
- When the people just
kept walking up to me,
like I never spoke to them, I didn't
even sit at the same table as them,
and they just walked up
to me, said something,
but it made me mad,
especially when the girl
threatened me, like, I kinda got, like,
an adrenaline rush, like, I wanted
to say something, but I couldn't.
- For years, we've been hearing
about the virtual explosion, but it
hasn't really taken off yet.
The costs of running VR equipment
are way too high for the average person.
While companies like Facebook, Google,
and Microsoft continue to invest
heavily in VR projects, VR so far
isn't making nearly as
much money as they hoped.
There's also some health concerns,
things you'd expect
from wearing a headset,
like motion sickness,
headaches, but there are
also other less common health concerns,
like cybersickness and post-VR sadness.
Yeah, look those up.
And of course, this needs more research.
We're not trying to scare you or anything.
(ghost screams)
But now, it's your turn.
What story would you tell if you could
immerse someone in your world?
I personally like, you know, I like
to garden a lot, so my VR world would
be, like, a garden and then, like,
you would just be setting
up, like, you know,
watering the plants and
seeds in the ground,
and like, 'cause I feel
like that's another
form of meditation and, like, tranquility,
and that's what I would
use VR for, personally,
but I don't know what
you guys have in mind.
Let us know in the comments below,
and if you like this video, you should
like, subscribe, and
watch all the other ones,
and tell your friends
to do the same thing.
(ambient music)
