Journalist testing VR for an article lost her balance when she reached to press button in the virtual world, falling off stool she was sitting on in real life and breaking her toe
A Russian man reportedly crashed into a glass table and bled to death while wearing VR goggles
Oculus, one of most popular types of VR headsets, now has feature that allows you to map out a safe zone and warns you when you’ve stepped past the perimeter
Can save on rental costs for office space and hold meetings on a tropical island
Supervisor can walk around and hear what people are talking about and join in conversations
Furniture shopping
Macy’s and IKEA have equipped furniture departments in stores around the country with VR headsets so customers can visualize what furniture will look in their home
No need to lug furniture home only to find it doesn’t fit or match
Details of room are entered on tablet, e.g., dimensions, window size, wall color
Then selected furniture is placed in position and you put on the headset to step into the room
Found that people bought more and returned less as a result
Walmart uses VR to train employees in all of its 4700 US stores
JetBlue trains technicians virtually – rather than having to rent a plane or do the training at 3am because that’s the only time the plane is available
Verizon has VR instruction module in which employee plays a store manager held up at gunpoint
30 Fortune 500 companies now use VR for training
Military uses VR for flight and battlefield simulation
Sports: many teams, e.g., football, now train players using 360˚ enactment of plays
“Embodiment through VR can induce can potentially induce a level of understanding and empathy that’s greater than any other form of communication we have today” (Thong Nguyen)
Virtual Interaction Lab at Stanford found that even a brief embodiment inside the avatar of an elderly person has a significant impact on person’s attitude toward the elderly
Columbia University’s “1000 Cut Journey” lets you experience racism firsthand from perspective of a black boy
VR body transfer technique: you watch your body morph into someone else’s while you are looking at your reflection in a full-length mirror
You experience being teased by other kids about your skin color, being stopped by the police as a teen, being denied a job you deserve…
Produces much greater impact than just reading about these things when they happen to “you”
Simulation in which you play the role of a lumberjack, using a chainsaw to cut down a sequoia after learning that similar trees could be saved if you stopped using fluffy toilet paper
Stanford researchers found that someone who performs this 2- minute exercise is 20% more likely to use less toilet paper compared with those who merely watched a video about deforestation (Ahn & Bailenson, 2011)
Snow World: Participants fly through snowy canyon, shooting snowballs at snowmen, polar bears, and igloos
Immersive experience is able to capture attention to distract from pain
Used for burn wound treatment, one of most painful types of medical procedures (Keefe, Huling, Coggins et al., 2012; Tashijan, Mosadeghi, Howard et al., 2017)
People participated in a virtual reality counseling session in which they alternately occupied a body representing themselves and one representing Freud
Could give themselves advice from the embodied perspective of Freud
Experimental participants experienced greater perception of change than controls who simply spoke to a scripted Freud character (Slater, Neyret, Johnston et al., 2019)
Virtual reality can change self perceptions in those with eating disorders
Researchers (Keizer, van Elburg, Helms et al, 2016) placed participants in a healthy sized avatar
Results:
Decrease in overestimation of one’s own body size and improved self body image
VR has been found to be effective in treating PTSD
VR can also be effectively used to treat phobias (Goncalves, Pedrozo, Coutinho et al., 2012) (Bohil, Alicea, & Biocca, 2011; Botella, Fernandez-Alverz, Guillen et al., 2017)
Construction: Inspector can walk around job site and accurately align and compare what is being built against the building information model which is projected through glasses to catch errors easily
Order picking in factories: Rather than using paper and hand-held scanner, worker can see instantly what needs to go where
Face recognition: Police in China are using smart glasses to identify suspects in crowds
Collaborative meetings: allows people from different parts of the world to work together as if they’re standing face-to-face
Medical education: can walk around 3-D objects and can literally see what is happening in the body, e.g., how the heart moves