HOW VIRTUAL REALITY COULD SAVE PLANNED PARENTHOOD
Regardless of what is and isn’t available at Planned Parenthood, this is just not how to act toward people, McDonald-Mosley says, and her organization made the film—and chose to make it in virtual reality—to help people see what it’s like to be treated that way. “Imagine how you would be if you were in a vulnerable situation just going to see your health care provider,” she says.
Jeremy Bailenson, founder of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, sees virtual environments as psychological states in which individuals can perceive themselves in new ways. Along with perfecting the technology, he wants to get a greater handle on its psychological effects. His is the first lab to study the effects of VR over the long term, with approximately 1,000 people participating in a wide range of scenarios that deal with prejudice, bullying and other social ills. At his lab, researchers create and manipulate VR representations of users in an attempt to fool their brains into changing their behaviors.
In one experiment, researchers altered college students’ avatars to look like their 65-year-old future selves and found those students were willing to put away twice as much money in savings than those whose avatars were unchanged. Bailenson told PBS NewsHour the visceral experience of seeing yourself older as opposed to just thinking how one day that will be true creates a “deep connection to your future self.” If VR can build that kind of connection in other cases, it could be a powerful tool.
See the full story here: http://www.newsweek.com/2016/07/15/planned-parenthood-virtual-reality-across-lines-478230.html