Experience on Demand

power of presence is not good only for cheap thrills—as I will show throughout the book, the psychological effects of VR can be profound and long-lasting. Study after study has shown the experiences that people have in VR have an impact on them. Their behaviors can change, and these changes don’t disappear right away. This leads to a conclusion that captures the considerable promise and perils of the medium. VR feels real, and its effects on us resemble the effects of real experiences. Consequently, a VR experience is often better understood not as a media experience, but as an actual experience, with the attendant results for our behavior.

VR is an experience generator. Because it is a digital medium, anything we can imagine seeing or hearing can be easily generated in a VR environment. (The other senses are more complicated.) This opens up some inspiring possibilities about the kinds of experiences we might want to have, and how those experiences can make us, and the world, a better place. On the other hand, if we choose to experience unhealthy environments and experiences, we can expect unhealthy results.

the two-dimensional flatness of the image, but by the framing of shots, the unnatural camera movements, the cuts and other editing tricks, and perhaps most importantly, the unusual perspectives created by the camera placement. These all violate the rules by which we normally encounter the world with our senses

or right, the virtual world is still there.

VR technology is designed to make itself disappear. When we watch a video on a screen, we have constant reminders of the artificiality of the experience. Film media are distinguished not only

VR is done right, all the cumbersome equipment—the goggles, the controller, the cables—vanishes. The user becomes engulfed in a virtual environment that simultaneously engages multiple senses, in ways similar to how we are accustomed to experience things in our daily “real” lives. This is distinctly different from other media experiences, which only capture fragmented aspects of what our senses can detect. For instance, the sounds you hear in good VR don’t come from a speaker rooted in one place. Instead, they are spatialized, and they get louder or softer depending on the direction you are facing (or if you are in a tracked environment, how close you move to the source of the sounds). When you look at something in VR, it is not framed by the dimensions of a monitor, or television set, or movie screen. Instead, you see the virtual world as you see the real one. When you look to the left or right, the virtual world is still there.

another reason VR works extremely well for learning is that it utilizes body movements. When you experience a VR simulation, you move your body as if you were experiencing an actual event in the real world. What makes

psychologically real, they are physiologically aroused in a way that is similar to what occurs during real experience. The sights and sounds of the practice field, along with the sight of large linemen charging, heighten the emotional state of the player using the trainer, which improves learning. You’re not sitting in a bucket of ice after the game, looking at an iPad; you are in there. This, perhaps, explains why VR also works so well as a visualization tool. There’s a lot of literature showing that visualizing actions helps with performance. The mere act of thinking about an action, for instance, produces brain activity similar to what you’d see if the action were actually being performed. But that is only if the visualization is done the right way. The problem, of course, is that there is a high variability in how well people can visualize and put themselves in those situations. With VR, coaches and trainers can create visualizations for players.

Another advantage of VR is that, because users’ brains are treating the experience they are having as psycholo

For touch, the floor shakes, and sometimes we use so-called haptic devices (more on this later).

Tracking is the process of measuring body movements. In the earthquake demo, we were tracking body position in X, Y, Z space, and the subject’s head rotation. In other words, if he walked forward a step (positive on Z), we measured that displacement in his body position. If he looked left (negative on yaw), we measured this rotation.

Tracking is the process of measuring body movements. In the earthquake demo, we were tracking body position in X, Y, Z space, and the subject’s head rotation. In other words, if he walked forward a step (positive on Z), we measured that displacement in his body position. If he looked left (negative on yaw), we measured this rotation.