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Less than two years ago, his lab was running experiments with a now clumsy-looking $40,000 headset that hung about 5 inches off the face.
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The speed of the change has surprised even him.
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“What are the consequences of a world where anything can happen at the touch of a button and feel like it’s actually happening?” “We are going from essentially no VR to potentially pervasive use of the most powerful medium ever,” he says. But that’s all set to change in 2016.įueled by the march of Moore’s law, advances borrowed from the smartphone industry and vast investment, a bevy of competing high-end consumer headsets will begin landing in living rooms-along with a new universe of content.Īnd that, to hear Bailenson say it, means a whole lot more than you probably think. “We like to say the brain isn’t evolved yet to know that a virtual experience is not real,” says Bailenson, a professor in the communication department whose doctorate is in cognitive psychology and who has been studying VR’s effects for two decades.Ī few years ago such an assertion would have meant little outside a small circle of academics: VR was a futuristic notion rarely seen except in labs and large institutions. Virtual reality-VR, to the initiated-is so realistic, so immersive, that it feels something like an actual experience. But those facts don’t seem to mean much to the large, primordial part of my brain that can’t quite disbelieve what my eyes are telling it.Įventually, I heed the quieter voice of reason and shuffle forward-which is more than many in this position manage to do-but my relief at putting the ordeal behind me only reinforces Bailenson’s point. The scene is a digital mirage delivered by a high-tech stereoscopic headset. Of course, there is no plank, and there is no pit. If there’s any comfort in the death drop gaping at my feet, it’s in the reminder that I’m just the latest in a long line of people to stifle a whimper in Jeremy Bailenson’s lab.įor years, Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab-where Bailenson is founding director-has initiated visitors from around the world into the power of virtual reality, often with the simple task now before me: walking across a rickety plank spanning a 30-foot-deep pit.