#009: Making the (virtual) world a better place
Part III: Reflections and What's Next
Today’s edition is about a 11-minute read. If you’re in a hurry, here are the takeaways:
This is the last of three posts about RISC’s virtual reality project, where we explored ways to use virtual reality for good. In this post, I’ll share a few reflections and talk about some other interesting applications of VR.
Over the course of this project, we struggled to come up with clear ideas for making an impact. We thought that VR could be a great tool for education, but we didn’t have any strong ideas for how or what our role would be. Any ideas that we did come up with were expensive and outside of our expertise. In future projects, it will be important to have a clear proposal for an idea or partnership. We also need to ask ourselves what we bring to the table with the problem; how will our presence materially move things forward?
Even though we ultimately put this project on ice, I spent a lot of time thinking about the current and future state of VR. I’m excited about the possibilities, but our exploration left me with a lot of questions. What makes for a good virtual reality experience? What are the implications of more frequent VR use? When is virtual reality better than reality?
Over the course of these posts, I’ve talked about many different use cases for VR. As I wrap up the discussion, I thought I’d share a few of my own (maybe out-there) ideas for using VR. What if we could use VR to relive moments in time? What if we could use VR to help researchers gain new intuitions in their field or experiment in ways that would be impossible or dangerous in the real world? What if we could enable safer, more visceral journalism?
Starting next month, I’m going to put a pause on writing about my current projects and focus on writing about new ideas, hard problems, and interesting articles. You’ll hear from me less often, but it’ll be more fun this way!
This is the final post about RISC’s virtual reality project. Here’s a recap of the journey so far.
I had been exploring potential positive use cases of VR, and my boss sanctioned a project on it after gaining an interest separately. My own research had uncovered promising uses of VR for treating people with PTSD and addiction. And those were just the tip of the iceberg it seemed (see VR for mental health and college access). It was clear that VR had specific powers. (1) It’s immersive; it can make you feel (emotionally) like you’re somewhere you’re not. (2) It’s interactive; it can allow you to feel (physically) a virtual environment. The potential excited us, but we didn’t have a specific idea in mind or any sense for how RISC would make something happen. Read more about the initial exploration here.
We narrowed our focus to VR in education, but we couldn’t find a way for RISC to get involved. At its best, we thought VR could unlock new ways to learn old concepts: maybe you could become a better reader by immersing yourself in the world of a book or gain a better intuition for math by interacting with a virtual world. But we were generally underwhelmed by the state of educational VR, which prioritized field trips over interactivity. In talking to teachers, startups, and industry leaders, it was clear that educational VR was stuck on virtual field trips because of affordability and usability. We had a few different ideas for how we might get involved, but it turned out we were either not well-suited to execute on them or someone else had beaten us to them. Read about our exploration into educational VR here.
In this post, I’ll share a few reflections and talk about some other interesting applications of VR.
A few reflections on the project
Over the course of this project, we struggled to come up with clear ideas for making an impact. We thought that VR could be a great tool for education, but we didn’t have any strong ideas for how or what our role would be in the implementation. It didn’t really scare us that we didn’t have ideas at the start; we hoped that we would find inspiration, problems, or partners by talking to a bunch of people. But since we didn’t come into conversations with a clear solution or a role for ourselves, we were limited in what we could accomplish. Despite a lot of excitement, people couldn’t react to anything specific, just the general idea of VR for education. We were essentially learning about market dynamics rather than iterating to a solution. In future projects, it will be important to balance talking to experts and stakeholders with having a clear proposal for an idea or partnership.
Any ideas that we did come up with were expensive and outside of our expertise. So many smart people were already working on so many things, and I think that scared me. What could we actually bring to the table when tons of people were thinking about this full-time? Short of somehow giving a VR headset to everyone in the U.S., it felt marginally impactful to spend our time in this space. Our next best bet was probably coming up with some crazy ideas for educational VR content, and we tried that. But you saw our list of ideas in my last post. In future projects, we will need to spend time thinking more clearly about what we bring to the table. How will our presence materially move things forward?
A few reflections on virtual reality
Even though we ultimately put this project on ice, I spent a lot of time thinking about the current and future state of VR. The technology has been around for decades, but the average person hasn’t been able to access or afford a good headset until recently. Now, big companies and venture capitalists are investing serious money, and I’m expecting VR to look seriously different in a few years. But it feels like virtual reality has been hyped up for years, and less than 20% of U.S. consumers tried VR in 2020. Is this thing really going to go anywhere? I’m definitely excited about the possibilities, but our exploration left me with a lot of questions.
What makes for a good virtual reality experience?
When we were trying to imagine the future of educational VR, I was struck by how hard it was to dream up good content ideas. By good, I mean content that made sense in virtual reality. As we thought of ideas, I constantly thought, “Why wouldn’t you just do this on a computer? Or in real life? I’ve come to share this article’s disposition that we don’t know what good VR looks like yet. Objects in VR look more realistic than they did, but I’m not sure we know the recipe for making compelling VR experiences (like we know how to make good horror movies or good 2D video games). VR needs an Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles to set some paradigms for the entire medium.
What are the implications of more frequent VR use?
Virtual reality is still new to the average consumer, and it’s a wild thing to experience for the first time. But imagine a future where everyone uses their VR headset every day. When the allure of virtual reality wears off and everyone knows how it works, will the immersion wear off too? Will we become desensitized to certain real world experiences because we experience them often in VR? Will we like those experiences better in VR? Nausea and eye strain are obvious physical constraints, but what other physical effects could come from using VR for, say, 8 hours a day? Will it actually correct our back problems from hunching over at the computer all day? And if we have even less reason to leave our dwellings, what will our cities and towns look like?
When is virtual reality better than reality?
Some exciting use cases outside of entertainment are emerging, especially in training (whether for surgery, customer service, or sports). You can only spend so much time practicing surgical techniques in the operating room; what if you could keep practicing from home? Companies are reporting serious performance gains from VR training, and the cost savings aren’t small either. But we should be cautious of using VR as a replacement for the real world. Virtual reality will be a cheaper and safer way to do literally everything, so the incentives will likely push its use for many things. But even if it’s cheaper to use VR for, say, job interview training in prisons, should we not strive for real people to conduct those trainings? Of course, VR training is better than no training, but we should carefully assess whether VR training is better than training in the real world.
As VR’s use cases extend beyond training, what metrics beyond costs and “outcomes” are important? If practice in VR makes me one hundred times better at soccer, should I bother going to real world practice with teammates? Technology and the pandemic have already driven us closer to a world where we don’t need much physical human interaction to go about our daily lives, and VR will allow us to do even less with each other physically. Is that a net good or net bad? I think it’s worth considering.
Some final ideas for virtual reality
Over the course of these posts, I’ve talked about many different use cases for VR: education, mental health, addiction, college access, and training. As I wrap up the discussion, I thought I’d share a few of my own (maybe out-there) ideas for using VR. I don’t claim that these ideas are good, but I do think they make use of VR’s unique powers.
VR for Memories
My family loves watching our old home videos from when my sister and I were kids. My parents often remark that they wish I could be “little again” for a day. Imagine a world in which we can either convert old home videos into 3D worlds or where we record our every moment through special contact lenses. What if we could use VR to essentially relive moments in time? We could experience moments not from the view of a camera but from the first-person. I have no idea what the social or mental health ramifications would be, but there would probably be some consumer demand for such a product. This developer had the same idea, and he experimented with it for himself. The half-hour YouTube video attached to the article is worth a watch.
VR for Research
Making breakthroughs in science takes incredible intuition and creativity. While computers and artificial intelligence can run simulations on a large scale, brilliant mathematicians and chemists have to imagine how the world works and devise tests for those theories. VR could be a useful tool on both fronts. Computers are limited in their ability to convey 3D models and data, but VR could let you literally walk around 3D objects. If we could provide tools for the brightest minds to visualize complex structures in math or complex molecules in chemistry, maybe they could gain new insights and generate breakthroughs at a much faster rate. Maybe we wouldn’t be limited to the mind of one genius who is able to visualize problems or solutions in ways that the rest of us can’t. Or on the other side, maybe we could run experiments in a virtual world that would be impossible or dangerous in the real world. This article mentions a few companies taking such an idea to researchers in the life sciences.
VR for Journalism
In my first post on VR, I wrote about my experience in the Oculus Quest 2 app Home After War, in which you explore a man’s home and his hometown of Fallujah, Iraq, as he tells you how things have changed since the Islamic State has left. The storytelling is done by a 360-degree camera placed in the middle of real people doing real life things, including a town meeting and a family dinner. Without any verbal or physical exchange, I felt a human connection with these people, something that I’ve never felt from watching a video (or at least it doesn’t happen so quickly). It strikes me that this medium could be a very powerful way to do journalism. Imagine learning about the situations in Ukraine or Israel not through words and videos but by actually witnessing events unfold. Drones or robot “journalists” with 360-degree cameras could move around a conflict area, interviewing people and roaming the streets. The public would have a near first-person window into breaking news, giving them a more visceral understanding of the situation. And journalists wouldn’t have to risk their lives to cover dangerous situations. It turns out that big news organizations don’t disagree that VR has great potential for storytelling, but this use case has, like education, been limited by low adoption of VR headsets. This article discusses some of the merits and limits of VR for journalism.
Switching it up next month
Well, this concludes my series on virtual reality. And it’s been fun writing about my projects, but it’s hard to generate a post every week. Truthfully, I find it more fun to write about pie-in-the-sky ideas, like I do at the end of the month.
Starting next month, I’m going to put a pause on writing about my current projects and focus on writing about new ideas, hard problems, and interesting articles. You’ll hear from me less often, but it’ll be more fun this way!
Until then,
Noah