Why Virtual Worlds should become a space for Shared Experiences, not Escapes.
A conversation with , Writer & Lecturer at Singularity University.
How will VR/AR shift the way school kids and students are learning today and which effects will it have ultimately on the human brain/ congnitve ability?
Some of the most exciting experiments happening in augmented and virtual reality are happening in the field of education, and for school children in particular, these tools will give teachers a far more immersive and compelling way to build lessons for students.
One example is a project at Google called Expeditions. The idea is that using virtual reality as a teaching tool, students can take digital field trips to places like the great barrier reef, Yosemite National Park, or things that don’t exist any longer like ancient Greece. You can imagine that getting an up close look at the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in virtual reality is a far more immersive experience than seeing pictures in a text book.
When I was a kid, my favorite television program was an educational cartoon show called The Magic School Bus — the premise was that the bus could take the students on field trips to outer space or shrink them to the size of a blood cell and give a tour of the human body. This is essentially now possible. Virtual reality has become that magic school bus. One of the outcomes of this, especially in the case of the human body example, is that human cognition can relate better to ideas when we get a first hand experience of something. When you have the experience of being the same size as a blood cell — it’s far easier to internalize the inner workings of how the body actually functions. My colleague at
, Tiffany Vora, our faculty in digital biology worked to develop an augmented reality tool to help explain how Crispr-Cas9 works by giving someone the opportunity to see it work through a Microsoft Hololens. Because the information appears in three-dimensional space as a hologram, our brain’s ability to understand the concept is enhanced. Humans are 3D thinking things — an idea my colleague Jody Medich argues quite often, and so AR/VR tools will provide a far more powerful way to learn new concepts.
Which ethical and cultural constraints need to be considered in order to create virtual learning worlds that may be transferred seamlessly into the real world?
An important thing to remember about these tools, is that they are among the most immersive tools for conveying information that human beings have ever created. That means that they are incredibly persuasive. Research at Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab has spent quite a bit of time looking at just how persuasive these tools are. In one experiment, a PhD candidate (at the time) demonstrated that children under a certain age, who experienced something like swimming with whales, had a difficult time distinguishing between what was a virtual experience and a real one.
Many of the children believed that their virtual experience had happened in real life. This should give us pause. In my own life, I have a six year old niece and a four year old nephew. I don’t yet feel comfortable letting my nephew use VR — but I will let my niece play in VR with supervision. We should be very careful about what kinds of experiences we expose people to — and not just children.
I don’t think we’re too far from a time when the first case of PTSD is diagnosed to someone who was harmed by a virtual reality experience. So I believe there should be a clear demonstration that any VR experience is designed with a clear intention that it does not cause harm to the user.
Can VR/ AR learning environments help with reskilling the workforce regarding job losses due to automation and robotics?
I think absolutely yes. There’s a difficult and scary conversation taking shape around the topic of labor displacement caused by technological unemployment and while this is not a new phenomenon in human history, the scary thing is the potential speed at which it could occur in it’s modern form.
Ultimately what we’ll need as society, is a way of educating for new skills at a speed we’ve never had to before.
Essentially we need something as close to being able to “download Kung Fu” like Neo in the Matrix. While we can’t do that exactly, just yet — AR/VR tools are perhaps the closest thing we have in my opinion. This was demonstrated to me recently when I interviewed a startup in the bay area called Tribe VR. At Tribe, they are trying to replace the massive youtube tutorial video business with immersive VR. In my first demo, I was placed in front of a DJ controller that electronic musicians use. I had no idea how the thing worked. Then they put me in VR, where I was guided through how to use it, by actually working with it using my own hands. It hit me then, that this could completely replace cooking videos, DIY project tutorials, and every other static video-based way we have of learning new skills. After five minutes in VR — I took the headset off, and I basically understood how to use the DJ equipment. This concept of learning by doing is one of the most important benefits of AR/VR in my opinion.
In Germany this is being leveraged as well, in the case of Volkswagen for example, who will be using immersive VR to train thousands of technicians this year. They clearly see the benefit of speeding up the transfer of knowledge using VR.
AR/VR enables humans to go beyond their comfort zone and familiar situations. Do you think that over time they will loose their ability of judgement — especially in risky situations?
This is an interesting question. There are certainly different classifications of risks a person can take, like physical risks such as walking on the ledge of a tall skyscraper, or social risks like attempting an edgy or sensitive joke around new people.
It makes sense that virtual and augmented reality can provide a “safe place” to push boundaries and test limits. In many cases this will be an entirely welcome and positive thing. In my own life, I have used virtual reality to become more comfortable dealing with the social pressure of public speaking for example.
, a writer, has developed some great research around the concept of flow states, a term which partially refers to heightened states of performance. In his research he shows that there’s a sweet spot of just how far outside your comfort zone you need to be to push yourself to grow and learn. If the task is too easy you get bored, and if it’s too difficult you shut down and in both cases you are no longer growing or learning. AR/VR can be a tool to find that sweet spot just outside our comfort zone. But in the case of losing our sense of judgements, I don’t have a fear that this would happen.It certainly could if someone mistakenly believes their skills in VR necessarily applies perfectly to the real world, but I don’t imagine many VR rock climber hobbyists would necessarily start believing they can now go free-hand climbing without proper real world training. This is something to keep an eye out for, and perhaps it does become something of a problem in the future. We’ll have to cautiously wait and see, but I’m not worried about it.
Regarding Ready Player One: Do you truly believe an artificial world calculated on graphic cards will/can beat real human interactions?
The topic of Ready Player One, and the developing concepts around online social virtual worlds is a fascinating area today. There are several platforms now building what is essentially The Oasis (an online metaverse) depicted in the film. I’ve spent some time in some of the latest versions of platforms like Sansar, High Fidelity, AltspaceVR, and VR Chat (which today is the largest and most popular — especially among teenagers). For now, and for quite a while I believe, they do not come close to replicating the benefits of real human interactions. That doesn’t mean they aren’t useful, exciting and provide specific benefits you can’t get in the real world, but I don’t think we’re close to replacing real human interactions in these worlds just yet.
Of course designers and engineers are quickly working to solve some of the technical barriers like low latency, facial expression tracking, and the other cues that can enhance realism inside these worlds. And eventually they will be very compelling. Even then, however, I think there will always be a premium placed on real interactions.
That said, I do think these tools will provide things that our real world can never provide us. We can become entirely different people, and experience what it’s like to be a different gender, a different race, or even a different species. Virtual worlds can also provide therapy to individuals who experience things in VR they could never get in real life.
In Second Life, for example, there are communities of Parkinson’s patients who meet up and share social activities by doing things in the virtual world their bodies would never allow them to do in the real world (horse-back riding, ice skating, etc). The last point I’d make is that Ready Player One is also a bit of a cautionary tale about how we should treat our real world. It’s quite a dystopian story in the sense that the real world has deteriorated to the point where citizens are using VR as an escape.
I think one lesson from the book and film is that a world in which online social VR is the primary location for human interaction is not necessarily an outcome we should aspire to. Online virtual worlds will hopefully become an exciting development we use to communicate, share experiences with loved ones, and play in — but not used as a form of escape.
So in that sense, I don’t believe VR will replace real human interaction. Or at least I certainly hope it doesn’t.
Aaron Frank will be sharing more of his interesting insights and opinions at the SingularityUGermany Summit, taking place this June 4–5, 2018.
If you like to join, get your ticket here!
