"This is the almost heady affair we've ever done in VR." High praise indeed coming from Jeremy Bailenson. Every bit the founding director of Stanford Academy's Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), he has conducted hundreds of experiments over the by twenty 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 furnishings of immersive media, information technology was his volume Infinite Reality they quoted. It's probably safe to presume, then, that professor Bailenson really knows what he'south talking virtually.

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 nosotros'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-upwardly HTC Vive setup at the lab withal 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 lot KNOW there's no driblet—experienced an convulsion, danced with Elmo from Sesame Street, and flew effectually a simulated city, only like Superman. Up until I smashed head-beginning into a concrete building, that was maybe the virtually fun I e'er had.

But the lab's work is not just almost 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 ability of VR to generate empathy is exactly what the Crystal Reef projection explores.

The Crystal Reef demo is in 2 parts: a 360 video followed by an interactive feel. The video starts with an aerial view of the rocky reefs of the Italian coastline of Ischia. So suddenly I'chiliad on a boat listening to marine scientist Fio Micheli. At commencement I tin't encounter her, and it takes me a little while to realize that I'grand facing the incorrect way and she'southward behind me. That's really one of the things I love most about VR video: Merely like in real life, y'all have to look around, interact with your surround and make sense of things for yourself. Only information technology'south when the demo moves underwater with the HTC Vive that the interactivity actually kicks up a notch.

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Divers are filmed off the coast of Monterey,California. Tom Atkinson

I can virtually experience the bubbles tickling me equally they rise from the corals, and I accept a powerful urge to reach out and bear upon the fish as they swim by. Trackers on my wrists allow me use breaststrokes to swim around the reef, and my dive hands mirror my own, so I experience like I'm in total control of where I go. As I explore, Micheli's voice explains the difference between the healthy reef teeming with life on my left, and the deplorable-looking monochrome mass to my right, plagued by high carbon and acerbity levels. Then the entire reef all of a sudden disappears, leaving only a barren and desolate landscape behind. Not a feel-proficient ending to my dive.

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 inquiry, designed to written report how virtual reality tin exist used to communicate climatic change in an immersive and scientifically valid fashion. He hopes it volition help bring awareness and beliefs change to the topic of ocean acidification—the process past which the ocean becomes more than 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'south Monterey Bay and transferring their movement information to create avatars—digital representations linked to existent-globe creatures—in virtual reality. Studies showed that people engage more than with those avatars than pre-programmed agents, so they wanted to come across whether this practical to animals every bit well. (It did: People felt much more upset as the fish disappeared when they idea they represented real-world fish.) The goal was to eventually permit people adopt those fish, creating a more personal connection with the ecosystem. He believes that virtual reality has definite advantages in the blazon of conservation experiences it can create.

"We put users in places they wouldn't commonly have admission to, then it does away with that sense of psychological distance. Nosotros can as well speed upwards the effects then that the procedure of a reef disappearing tin be experienced in a few minutes rather than 100 years," Karutz says.

When experienced in—alibi the pun—full immersion this is pretty powerful stuff. The navigation with hand movements is part of what Karutz calls "embodied cognition." "When you lot use total body motions with all limbs y'all create higher date and learning," he explains.

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

Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg knows a affair or ii almost that. His company has been managing open-earth virtual platform 2d Life (SL) for over a decade. The fact that SL is profitable and however attracts around a 1000000 users a month in spite of its age and technical limitations is a attestation to the enduring appeal of those virtual environments. 2nd Life 'due south success is now funding Linden Lab's new VR venture, code named Projection Sansar, due to launch in the summer. 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'thou at present inhabiting that avatar, because it's my hands moving, information technology'south my face moving. Now you're not seeing dolls, you're seeing humans. Having that experience is a whole dissimilar thing. It's exciting, information technology'due south scary, and it could even exist traumatic."

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

Bailenson and the Crystal Reef squad are hopeful this will make a real difference to marine conservation, particularly now that virtual reality is attracting such interest, and the popularization of the applied science will allow these messages to be delivered to a mass audition:

"If you show someone the consequences of their deportment in virtual reality, information technology makes them rethink their concrete beliefs," says Bailenson. "With concepts like climate alter, or deforestation, or even pollution, we can use virtual reality to make the relationship between human beliefs and their consequences less abstruse and more concrete."

Watching nature'due south greatest wonders fade before your eyes, and knowing that yous're at to the lowest degree partially to blame, might not be most people's idea of fun, simply the overall experience is hopeful: It's in our power to exercise something virtually it. And that is what VR is all about, turning united states of america from passive spectators to active agents in a irresolute globe shaped by our actions.