Immersive technologies bring new opportunities to engage, teach and entertain children, but what are the safeguards we must put in place?

The overall sense that emerges from the research is that immersive technologies such as VR could become valuable learning tools
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As more children start using virtual reality, it will be critical for parents and teachers to understand the effect it can have. This is what a new report Virtual Reality 101: What You Need to Know About Kids and VR is hoping to contribute towards. Produced in collaboration with independent nonprofit organisation Common Sense Media, it is a resource to better understand how this new technology can be applied to everyday life and learning.

“Because VR is in its infancy, we have a unique opportunity to stay on top of this technological wave before it overwhelms us,” says report Co-author Jim Steyer, Founder of Common Sense Media.

Compared to other media, VR is a powerful way to deliver information
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Report Co-author Jeremy Bailenson – a communication professor at Stanford University and founder of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab – explains that research about the effects of the medium on children is only just emerging: “Compared to other media, VR is an extremely powerful way to deliver information. VR responds to your body. If you want to get closer to an object you can actually walk; if you want to touch something you can reach out and get haptic feedback. It’s perceptually surrounding, so no matter where you turn there is content.”

The report also includes the results of a survey of 3,613 parents about their attitudes toward virtual reality.

“Until this survey, it was unclear how, and even how many, kids were using virtual reality,” Bailenson says. “Now we have an initial picture of its adoption and use.”

The overall sense that emerges from the research is that immersive technologies such as VR could indeed become valuable learning tools, and 62 percent of parents surveyed for the report agree that VR can offer educational experiences for their children.

But parents and educators still need to take some precautions, Bailenson says. In the survey, 11 percent of parents reported their 8- to 17-year-olds experienced dizziness, 10 percent experienced a headache, and 13 percent bumped into something. He therefore cautions that parents need to supervise their children when they use VR and ensure they do so in moderation, limiting sessions to 10 or 20 minutes and enforcing regular breaks.

As more children start using virtual reality, it will be critical for parents and teachers to understand the effect it can have
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“We found that kids can develop more trust in media characters in the virtual environment,” says Jakki Bailey, a graduate from Stanford’s PhD program in communication and now an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

In a 2009 study, Bailenson found that when elementary-aged school children saw themselves swimming with orca whales in a virtual environment, many later recalled the experience as real. Building off that research, a 2017 study Bailenson conducted with Bailey showed that media characters in virtual reality may be more influential over young children than characters on TV or computers.

62 percent of parents surveyed for the report agree that VR can offer educational experiences for their children
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In partnership with the Sesame Workshop, Bailenson and Bailey set up an interactive and immersive VR environment where children aged between four and six played games with the popular Sesame Street character Grover. Their observations showed that when children were engaged with the VR version of Grover versus a version on a two-dimensional screen, they were more likely to treat him as a friend.

As immersive technologies become pervasive and seamlessly intersect with the physical world, educators need to proactively understand and prepare for this change rather than reactively adapt to it
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Building on their previously published research on Immersive Virtual Reality and the Developing Child and Considering virtual reality in children’s lives, Bailey notes that this influence can be a positive force in teaching, as children are more likely to turn to that source for information and learning.

Speaking – appropriately through a Virtual Reality platform, AltspaceVR – at the recent Global Education and Skills Forum in Dubai, Bailey advocated for teachers and parents to be mindful of the greater psychological impact these virtual environments have, particularly in young children. The very element which makes Immersive Technology such a powerful learning tool – the sense of psychological presence it affords the user – could also be potentially damaging.

The very element which makes Immersive Technology such a powerful learning tool – the sense of psychological presence it affords the user – could also be potentially damaging
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Speaking at the Global Education and Skills Forum in Dubai, Bailey advocated for teachers and parents to be mindful of the greater psychological impact these virtual environments have
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For companies looking to get into Immersive technologies such as VR/AR/MR/XR our Virtual Reality Consultancy services offer guidance and support on how best to incorporate these into your brand strategy.

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedInand follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Report: Kids and VR appeared first on Tech Trends.

Professor Jeremy Bailenson from Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab explains what Virtual Reality is, how it works, and what it can do

I’m still old enough to remember a time when typing a message on a touchscreen keyboard felt very cutting-edge indeed. But I also remember doing that for the first time in a crowded Apple store, with no real intention of buying the first-generation iPhone I was playing with. The experience felt interesting and exciting, but not necessarily useful, and certainly not necessary.

It’s only a matter of time before technologies such as Virtual and Augmented Reality will transform the way we interact with digital content
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This, many experts argue, is the stage we’re currently at with Virtual Reality: It’s an exciting technology with interesting applications that people are happy to try out – but not yet willing to embrace fully.

Yet just as the tipping point eventually came around when even my grandparents bought their own smartphones – and used them every day – there is a building consensus that it’s only a matter of time before technologies such as Virtual and Augmented Reality will transform the way we interact with digital content in even more fundamental ways than the smartphone has done.

Virtual Reality is an exciting technology with interesting applications that people are happy to try out - but not yet willing to embrace fully
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For those feeling befuddled by that whole idea, Experience on Demand is certainly a helpful read, and oftentimes an entertaining one as well. Its author – Professor Jeremy Bailenson – is the Director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, and one of the world’s greatest authorities on Virtual Reality, yet this doesn’t come across as an academic book.

When writing about technology, it’s often difficult to strike a balance between ensuring that enough of the basics are covered without being patronizing to those already familiar with the subject. The book walks that fine line very well by focusing primarily on the human experience, so that whether or not you know what terms like latency, rendering, tracking or lag mean, you should come away with a better understanding of what Virtual Reality actually does.

As an expert in psychology and mass media, Bailenson has largely remained unalarmed about the extent to which traditional media affect us. Yet he writes that as absorbing as books or videogames or television are, they pale next to Virtual Reality: “VR engulfs us (…) it’s the apotheosis of every media fear and fantasy we’ve ever had,” he writes.

Bailenson's book places VR within a broader social context
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His book does a good job of pulling back the focus to place VR within a broader social context, explaining how it relates to other technologies – both traditional and emerging – and our existing relationship with the digital world.

Although he cites scientific research throughout, the book is mainly pegged around personal anecdotes and use cases that illustrate what it does to real people, and why it matters to everyone, not just the techy crowd. The picture that emerges is of an astoundingly broad range of applications for Virtual Reality, none of which involve either gaming or pornography.

VR engulfs us. It’s the apotheosis of every media fear and fantasy we’ve ever had
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There are examples of how VR can be a powerful learning tool
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Those anecdotes tell the story of how NFL teams have significantly improved the performance of their players by training them in Virtual Reality simulations, and how VR is being used to treat conditions such as chronic phobias and Alzheimer’s. It has helped 9/11 victims overcome posttraumatic stress disorder, and burns patients manage their pain with fewer opioids.

There are examples of how VR can be a powerful learning tool, as Bailenson argues that almost any skill can be improved by virtual instruction (groups learning tai chi moves in virtual reality remembered their moves better and performed them back with 25% greater accuracy than those who had been taught by watching a video, for instance).

We also learn how VR’s unique ability to create empathy by literally “placing you in someone else’s shoes” has been successfully applied to a variety of scenarios, from helping people relate on a personal level to issues such as climate change, to tackling bias and prejudice in diversity training.

Several bizarre experiments describe how experiencing a simulated virtual scenario first-hand can result in instant and lasting changes in behaviour
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Several – often rather bizarre – experiments in the book describe how experiencing a simulated virtual scenario first-hand can result in instant and lasting changes in behaviour. In one, they explored if walking around as a virtual cow might change participants’ attitude towards consuming red meat, while in another, people visualized their energy consumption during a shower in terms of literally eating lumps of coal, and subsequently went on to use hot water more sparingly. And although more research is needed to verify such results at scale, it is difficult to remain unimpressed by these early indications of VR’s power to create empathetic responses in people – not only in relation to other human beings, but also towards animals and the environment.

One of the surprising arguments that Bailenson puts forward seems to be that by living more of our lives in virtual worlds we can help save the real one. Business travel, for example, could be vastly reduced if we are able to replicate in VR the same levels of interaction and feeling of presence that one gets from face-to-face meetings.

The more time you spend in virtual experiences, the more you come to appreciate the vibrancy of real life
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“Conspicuous or wasteful consumption in the real world comes with real costs, be it in fossil fuel consumption, the mountains of plastic junk that are piling up in our homes and landfills, or the floating islands of garbage that are growing in our oceans…. When considered this way, deep engagement in social virtual worlds seems less scary than the dystopian scenarios would have us believe, and may have significant social benefits,” he says.

This desire to protect the environment reflects a passionate appreciation of the real world which might seem out of place for someone who has spent the last two decades studying computer-generated environments. Paradoxically, he argues, the more time you spend in virtual experiences, the more you come to appreciate the vibrancy of real life.

Business travel could be vastly reduced if we are able to replicate in VR the same levels of interaction and feeling of presence that one gets from face-to-face meetings
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Although Bailenson is clearly an enthusiast and advocate for the broader benefits of Virtual Reality, he also addresses its potential dark side, sounding a warning note against the danger of using what he describes as “the most psychologically powerful medium in history” without proper care or consideration.

One of the surprising arguments that Bailenson makes is that by living more of our lives in virtual worlds we could help save the real one
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Virtual Reality represents the culmination of the way technology is enveloping our lives, and its psychological effects can be profound and long lasting, he cautions. It is therefore important that we learn to use this new medium responsibly, and the best way to do this is to understand exactly what we’re dealing with. As Bailenson is fond of telling journalists, Uranium can equally be used to heat homes or make nuclear bombs. Technologies like VR are neither good nor evil, but how people will choose to apply it remains an open question.

This article was originally published on VRScout

What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do #BookPreview via @alicebonasio https://t.co/qzYRe5smBr pic.twitter.com/Vw2sh7D7t8

— VRScout (@VRScout) January 30, 2018

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Book Review: Experience on Demand appeared first on Tech Trends.

Ocean acidification is not something most people are immediately passionate about. Unless they understand it, that is. When you realize that this process will effectively wipe out some of some of our world’s most beautiful landscapes, and a decimate countless species of marine flora and fauna that depend upon it, then it starts to become a bit more real. And that’s where VR comes in, because VR is very good at bringing abstract concepts to life and making them feel real for the user.

Ocean acidification could wipe out entire marine ecosystems
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The Ocean Acidification VR Experience does this by taking you on a journey where you can see where those carbon dioxide molecules go, and what they do, once they leave your car’s exhaust pipe. It shows you exactly how the CO2 we pump into the atmosphere every day has a direct impact on the health of coral reefs, and the broader ocean ecosystem. This is a project I’ve been following for quite a while now, having first met the team working on it at Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab early last year.

The Crystal Reef VR experience was popular when it premiered at Tribeca last year
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After the enthusiastic response they got from showcasing their Crystal Reef 360 video experience in film festivals such as Tribeca and I talked to the project lead Cody Karutz about how the immersive nature of VR as a medium increased people’s empathetic connection to the problem. Their research has consistently found evidence that creating such an emotional connection is a factor in getting people to positively change their behavior and therefore reduce their emissions. Since then, the team have continued their research into how this increased engagement and empathy could be leveraged as an education tool.

“360 video is good for showing the user something in a more immersive way, but it has some passive limitations. By making the experience interactive like we’ve done here it gives the user a framework for not only observing, but also relating their actions to their own situation. We still have a way to go on perfecting how that works, but it’s pretty powerful,” explains Karutz.

When they premiered that previous 360 version at Tribeca, the team asked users for their consent in collecting data about their experience: “Usually it would take us a really long time to collate that much feedback in the lab, but in the space of one weekend we got hundreds of responses,” Karutz says. And this has proved extremely useful in developing the new iteration, which was demoed for the first time at the Global Education and Skills Forum in Dubai this week. The event, organized by the Varkey Foundation, explores how education can be used to solve the worlds’ problems, and this year particularly focused on how we can equip children to become global citizens. And key part of this concept of global citizenship is caring for the environment.

Read the article on UploadVR

VR Experience From Stanford Shows How We’re Killing Our Coral Reefs https://t.co/S0Bfwr1jGU via @UploadVR

— Alice Bonasio (@alicebonasio) March 19, 2017

The post Experiencing the Consequences of Climate Change in VR appeared first on Tech Trends.

From body scans to morphing to animated selfies, the future is bright, if a little weird.

In this UploadVR article I talk to 3 companies pushing the boundaries of 3D avatar design and get the perspective from Virtual Reality experts such as Professor Jeremy Bailenson from Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab on what we’re looking for in our virtual skins.

Immersion and meaningful social interaction in #VR will only happen when we feel comfortable in our virtual skins
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VR development is moving at breakneck speed on all fronts, and 2017 is set to see the launch of several long-awaited platforms like Sansar, which are all betting big on Social VR and user-generated content. Most of the focus so far has been on building those worlds and experiences, but if we’re ever to achieve a true sense of presence in these virtual worlds, we need to also be able to create really good avatars. Full immersion and meaningful social interaction can only really happen if we feel comfortable in our virtual skins.

Huge advancements in facial tracking technology have made it a lot easier and cheaper to render realistic facial expressions on an avatar, which might push ahead of cartoony stuff like Facebook showcased earlier this year. Social presence – that sense of really being with another person – is associated with more rewarding communication experiences and higher levels of empathy toward others. It follows, then, that for people to want to engage with each other in virtual environments, we need to foster that sense of social presence, which means getting your avatars right.

We are the Identity-Makers of the New World
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Research has found that simple things such as holding an avatar’s gaze for longer – only 4 seconds as opposed to 2 – already made people feel more positively toward the other person’s avatar that they were interacting with in the experiment. Professor Jeremy Bailenson, Director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford, also recently conducted a study that showed just how sensitive we are to such subtle variations in facial expressions, and how small changes can have a big impact in the quality of our virtual social interactions. His study included 158 participants and looked at whether enhancing your avatar’s smile during a virtual conversation would affect a user’s perception of the person with which they were interacting.

“Our research has demonstrated for almost two decades that small changes in the appearance and behavior of avatars can affect a social interaction,” explains Bailenson. “In the current study, simply putting a gain factor on smiles–such that a pair of people saw slightly bigger smiles on one another–caused people to speak more positively and feel happier.”

There are a lot of people out there obsessing about creating a way for users to  generate, personalize and “own” their avatars – in the sense that they are able to use them across any platform or device, and for any purpose. Companies such as Itsme, Morph3D and Loom, for example, are bringing technology to market looking to enable users to do just that. And although they’re all approaching the infamous Uncanny Valley from different directions, there’s a general consensus that these avatar-generating tools need to be agnostic. That means using Dolby-like licensing models and open APIs so that users can port their avatars into whatever platform they want, whether that’s Sansar, Steam or Facebook. We talk to those start-ups about how they see the future of avatars shaping up.

Body Scanning: Itsme

“We are the Identity-Makers of the New World,” says Itsme CEO Pete Forde, who wants people to use their technology to create expressive and persistent identities. “What we have done is to create a scalable process that is capable – with careful execution – of being the method by which the world gets turned into avatars.”

His Toronto-based company has been working on their body-scanning tech for the past three years, and claims to have invented a method that is free for the end user and fully automated, allowing the person to see a 3D avatar render within one minute of getting scanned.

They already captured about 8,000 people so far during a five-city tour of Canada with Samsung. Their first product is due to launch in January and will be a personalized avatar keyboard, called Itsmoji, which allows you to use versions of your animated personalized avatars as emojis.

They already captured about 8,000 people so far during a five-city tour of Canada with Samsung
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Forde believes the realism afforded by this technique – which captures both your body shape and movements – will be key to developing avatars for social platforms:

“Normal people have absolutely zero interest in meeting complete strangers online, and what Facebook figured out early on is that people will not engage unless they are connected with at least 10 real friends within 14 days. Attempting to learn from history, our growth model is based on creating relationships based on tight pockets of friends that actually know each other.”

As people invest more time and project more of their own identity into those avatars, it is important to also ensure there are policies and procedures in place to lock them down in terms of privacy and security: “think FB-style granular permissions,” says Forde.

Itsme is currently closing their seed investment round and preparing SDKs for Unity and Javascript to let developers use avatars directly in their projects and products. They’re also working to create apps that allow you to do all sorts of interesting things with your avatar, such as applying Snapchat-like filters to them, getting a 3D figurine printed, or going to the Shopify store (one of their current partners) to try on some clothes and see how they’d look on you. Future social use cases could also include buying tickets to sold-out sports events and watching them in 360, with your friends sitting next to you in the front row.

“I don’t have a problem with artistic/cartoon avatars per se,” Forde concludes. “There’s a place for them, and if people want to play as a robot or a bunny, knock yourselves out. I don’t see it as an either/or proposition. But if I put you in the dance club and you’re controlling one of these avatars, I want someone to be able to join the party with you and have them essentially play ‘who is the real person’ Turing style. What excites me is that we can now start to experiment with all of this stuff instead of wondering if someday it might be possible.”

Buid-a-Self: Morph3D

When you customize your character, your clothes automatically morph to fit your chosen shape
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With Morph3D’s Ready Room tool, you can create custom persistent avatars that can be used across any number of VR platforms, and Philip Rosedale’s High Fidelity social VR platform is among its first customers.

It relies on more traditional methods of creating avatars by tapping into its enormous crowdsourced database of assets created over the past 15 years by the members of Daz 3D (a separate company run by the same management team as Morph 3D).

For game and app developers this is a huge time saver as it plugs into the Unity engine and lets players craft their own characters. Currently there are over 400 3D characters available to use in VR applications on their platform. Each of those can also be morphed using sliders, providing an incredibly broad range of customization possibilities on top of that.

Over time it will be interesting to see how Morph 3D can be used in a broader variety of non-gaming applications, and how it applies to AR/MR as well as VR hardware
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When you customize your character, your clothes automatically morph to fit your chosen shape – be it of a little girl or a bulky man — and the final result can be imported into various social VR applications. Morph3D’s Director of AR/VR Chris Madsen says the objective is to make the process user-friendly and intuitive enough “so my mom can make a character for virtual reality.”

Over time it will be interesting to see how Morph 3D can be used in a broader variety of non-gaming applications, and how it applies to AR/MR as well as VR hardware. They have already started developing an interface which works with HoloLens voice control, for example, where you can modify the size of your character by saying commands such as “small” or “big”.

Loom’s technology turns selfies into personalized 3D avatars
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Selfie Avatars: Loom.ai

Video embedded above shows how an avatar generated from a single inset image
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Loom’s technology turns selfies into personalized 3D avatars by applying machine learning to automate human face visualization. It uses public APIs and VFX to create life-like visualizations which can then be animated and used for a range of applications. Video embedded above shows how an avatar generated from a single inset image (in these cases of celebrities such as Will Smith and Angelina Jolie) can look remarkably life-like and expressive.

These are the same types of techniques used in films such as The Avengers to transpose mark Ruffalo’s perceptually salient features onto his version of the Hulk, but using machine learning allowed the company to take what has traditionally been an extremely long, complicated and expensive process into something that’s now available to everyone.

“The magic is in bringing the avatars to life and making an emotional connection,” explains Loom CEO Mahesh Ramasubramanian. “Using facial musculature rigs powered by robust image analysis software, our partners can create personalized 3D animated experiences with the same visual fidelity seen in feature films, all from a single image.”

Loom counts Jeremy Bailenson  – plus Halo creator Alex Seropian  – among its advisors, and has an otherwise impressive pedigree, with a founding team that includes visual effects and animation veterans from LucasFilm and DreamWorks. Ramasubramanian worked on films such as Shrek, while CTO Kiran Bhat was R&D facial lead on The Avengers and Pirates of the Caribbean.

These are the same types of techniques used in films such as The Avengers
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Loom.ai just announced today that it raised a $1.35M seed round from a range of investors including Y Combinator and Greg Castle from Anorak Ventures, who was a seed investor in Oculus.

“Easily getting your likeness into the digital world has widespread applications,” says Castle. “The impact of experiences is significantly increased when you can visualize yourself in a game, simulation, communication environment or advertisement.”

Bailenson believes this approach will revolutionize how avatars are made, bringing a greater sense of copresence to virtual and augmented reality by giving us avatars that are lifelike and can be both animated and stylizized.

“This is important because social VR is likely to be the home run application in VR,” he explains. “And that all starts with building avatars that look and behave like their owners.”

Article originally published on UploadVR

These 3 companies are working to give us better bodies in VR. via @alicebonasio #VR https://t.co/cWaoofyYEU pic.twitter.com/eL7YoCXw7K

— Upload (@UploadVR) December 13, 2016

For companies looking to get into VR/AR/MR our Virtual Reality Consultancy services offer guidance on how these technologies can enhance and support your brand strategy.

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post What does the Future of Avatars Look Like? appeared first on Tech Trends.

Might seem far-fetched, but VR has been proven to increase feelings of empathy. Researchers at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab are now using this immersive technology to make people connect with the impact they are having on the environment.

“This is the most exciting thing we’ve ever done in VR.” High praise indeed coming from Jeremy Bailenson. As the founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), he has conducted hundreds of experiments over the past 20 years on how virtual reality shapes human interaction, regularly collaborating with Silicon Valley companies and consulting with government agencies. When the U.S. Supreme Court recently debated the effects of immersive media, it was his book Infinite Reality they quoted. It’s probably safe to assume, then, that professor Bailenson really knows what he’s talking about.

We arrived at the sunny Stanford campus on a Thursday afternoon, the entire team was scrambling to finish The Crystal Reef, a VR film project being premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival that weekend and all demos had been canceled. But since we’d traveled all the way from England, we got a private tour instead, so all’s well that ends well.

Having previously tried various experiences on the Samsung GearVR and Google Cardboard, I wasn’t exactly a “ViRgin,” but the souped-up HTC Vive setup at the lab still blew me away. Over the next half an hour, I “walked the plank” over a simulated pit—surprisingly scary in spite of the fact you KNOW there’s no drop—experienced an earthquake, danced with Elmo from Sesame Street, and flew around a simulated city, just like Superman. Up until I smashed head-first into a concrete building, that was possibly the most fun I ever had.

Watching nature’s greatest wonders fade before your eyes, and knowing that you’re at least partially to blame, might not be most people’s idea of fun, but the overall experience is hopeful
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But the lab’s work is not just about fun. Its mission is finding out how these immersive experiences can be applied to improve everyday life in all sorts of areas such as conservation, communications systems and empathy. And the power of VR to generate empathy is exactly what the Crystal Reef project explores.

The Crystal Reef demo is in two parts: a 360 video followed by an interactive experience. The video starts with an aerial view of the rocky reefs of the Italian coastline of Ischia. Then suddenly I’m on a boat listening to marine scientist Fio Micheli. At first I can’t see her, and it takes me a little while to realize that I’m facing the wrong way and she’s behind me. That’s actually one of the things I love most about VR video: Just like in real life, you have to look around, interact with your environment and make sense of things for yourself. But it’s when the demo moves underwater with the HTC Vive that the interactivity really kicks up a notch.

We put users in places they wouldn’t normally have access to, so it does away with that sense of psychological distance
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Cody Karutz is the Stanford graduate student who created the reef project, a collaboration between the VHIL and Hopkins Marine Station. It’s effectively the cinematic rendering of his thesis research, designed to study how virtual reality can be used to communicate climate change in an immersive and scientifically valid way. He hopes it will help bring awareness and behavior change to the topic of ocean acidification—the process by which the ocean becomes more acidic as it soaks up carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere.

Karutz’s previous projects included tagging live fish in the kelp forests of California’s Monterey Bay and transferring their movement data to create avatars—digital representations linked to real-world creatures—in virtual reality. Studies showed that people engage more with those avatars than pre-programmed agents, so they wanted to see whether this applied to animals as well. (It did: People felt much more upset as the fish disappeared when they thought they represented real-world fish.) The goal was to eventually let people adopt those fish, creating a more personal connection with the ecosystem. He believes that virtual reality has definite advantages in the type of conservation experiences it can create.

“We put users in places they wouldn’t normally have access to, so it does away with that sense of psychological distance. We can also speed up the effects so that the process of a reef disappearing can be experienced in a few minutes rather than 100 years,” Karutz says.

When experienced in—excuse the pun—full immersion this is pretty powerful stuff. The navigation with hand movements is part of what Karutz calls “embodied cognition.” “When you use full body motions with all limbs you create higher engagement and learning,” he explains.

In the video Micheli explains that the hardest part of a conservationist’s job is making people care. The whole Crystal Reef simulation is designed to make you do just that, and it works. I was left with a palpable sense of loss as the reefs disappeared and morphed into what scientists call an “ocean moonscape.” No wonder filmmaker Chris Milk called virtual reality the “ultimate empathy machine” in his recent TED Talk. We’re much more likely to care about something if we feel like we’re more than mere spectators.

Bailenson and the Crystal Reef team are hopeful this will make a real difference to marine conservation
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Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg knows a thing or two about that. His company has been managing open-world virtual platform Second Life (SL) for over a decade. The fact that SL is profitable and still attracts around a million users a month in spite of its age and technical limitations is a testament to the enduring appeal of those virtual environments. Second Life ’s success is now funding Linden Lab’s new VR venture named Sansar.  Altberg plans for Sansar users to be able to easily create and share their own VR experiences, and he’s enthused about bringing fully immersive content to the masses:

“In VR, I’m now inhabiting that avatar, because it’s my hands moving, it’s my face moving. Now you’re not seeing dolls, you’re seeing humans. Having that experience is a whole different thing. It’s exciting, it’s scary, and it could even be traumatic.”

VHIL researchers have also found that virtual reality is much more powerful than traditional media in changing behavior, even getting people recycle more or eat less meat. In one experiment, participants took a “virtual shower” and were given visual feedback (such as images of burning coal) based on the amount of energy they used to heat and transport that virtual water. When washing their hands in the physical world afterward, participants exposed to this vivid imagery consistently reduced their hot water consumption.

Bailenson and the Crystal Reef team are hopeful this will make a real difference to marine conservation, specially now that virtual reality is attracting such interest, and the popularization of the technology will allow these messages to be delivered to a mass audience:

“If you show someone the consequences of their actions in virtual reality, it makes them rethink their physical behavior,” says Bailenson. “With concepts like climate change, or deforestation, or even pollution, we can use virtual reality to make the relationship between human behavior and their consequences less abstract and more concrete.”

Watching nature’s greatest wonders fade before your eyes, and knowing that you’re at least partially to blame, might not be most people’s idea of fun, but the overall experience is hopeful: It’s in our power to do something about it. And that is what VR is all about, turning us from passive spectators to active agents in a changing world shaped by our actions.

Read the full article on the Newsweek website

VR developers want you to feel something when you hear reefs are dying https://t.co/Lamn0nDT59 pic.twitter.com/qkq6T5mf2P

— Newsweek (@Newsweek) May 13, 2016

For companies looking to get into VR/AR/MR our Virtual Reality Consultancy services offer guidance on how these technologies can enhance and support your brand strategy.

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Can Virtual Reality Help Save Our Coral Reefs? appeared first on Tech Trends.

“It all started with a Hackathon,” Jennifer Holland, Google Apps for Education Program Manager tells me. In typical tech fashion, a bunch of Googlers thought it would be great to combine the Virtual Reality technology being rolled out with Google Cardboard with their education offering already embraced by teachers from all over the world. Throw in Google Maps/Earth/Streetview into the mix, and the idea for Google Expeditions was born.

Google Expeditions was born out of a Hackathon project
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They started testing out these virtual field trips in classrooms a year ago, and since then have worked with content partners to create more than 200 immersive experiences that take students to places like Versailles, Machu Pichu, Buckingham Palace and the Burj Khalifa building in Dubai.

In one year, Google's Virtual Reality made over 200 immersive experiences available to a million students
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Since then VR has taken off in a big way, and many companies realized the great potential of the technology to engage students in the classroom. I recently talked to San Francisco-based start-up Nearpod about how their VR lesson plans have been a huge hit with both teachers and students in the 6 months since they started incorporating the technology into their platform:

“kids go from looking at 2×4 pictures of corals to literally being immersed into a coral reef that reacts to their movements, but it goes beyond just visual immersion. The fact that students can control what they look at gives a personalized feel of exploration to their experience,” their CEO Guido Kovalskys told me.

Google also took their users underwater when it worked with Sir David Attenborough and Alchemy VR to create a virtual expedition to the Great Barrier Reef:

“Through virtual reality, I’m lucky enough to be able to share my experiences with audiences of all ages to allow them to explore and learn about these diverse ecosystems in a more immersive way,” said Sir David, who has always been a pioneer in using technology to educate the public about the wonders of the natural world.

Google worked with Sir David Attenborough to let users experience the Great Barrier Reef in Virtual Reality
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Cody Karutz from Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab also agrees that virtual reality has definite advantages in creating empathy for the environment and thus aiding conservation. His own coral-related project Crystal Reef was showcased in this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, and the VHIL created a version of it for Expeditions that Google has been using for many months now, says the lab’s Director Jeremy Bailenson.

Google says they’re “thrilled by the potential” of VR technology, and announced new partnerships with the Associated Press and Getty Images to incorporate current affairs content into the platform and give teachers more options to work Virtual Reality into lesson plans.

With companies like Facebook investing heavily VR, Google is also making larger moves towards staking its claim in that space. At their annual developer conference this week they also unveiled Daydream, their new mobile Virtual Reality platform to enable high quality VR on Android smartphones. Also significant is the announcement that they will be building an intuitive controller that works in tandem with the headset to produce richer and more immersive experiences.

Google will launch its own Mobile VR platform and build intuitive controller to create better experiences
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Next month EdTech Trends will be visiting Google’s New York office to talk to their VR and Education teams about how new products and developments will mean for students and teachers around the world, and what we can expect next in these exciting times for virtual reality, and for education. Watch this space.

To find out how to leverage VR/AR/MR in your enterprise, Tech Trends offers bespoke Virtual Reality Consultancy support

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

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