What Virtual Reality Is Good For
The key to understanding virtual reality, Bailenson said, is that it’s both potent and taxing. It’s potent because it’s so visceral and immediate that it can trick your brain into mistaking it for reality. In doing so, his research shows, VR experiences can change how people think about themselves and others, perhaps in places where other media might fail. In a just-published study, Bailenson and colleagues found that taking the perspective of a cow or even a coral reef in a VR simulation produced more empathy for those organisms’ plights than watching a video about them. In a 2013 experiment, people who experienced colorblindness through a VR simulation went on to spend more time helping people with colorblindness than those who merely imagined having the condition.
Yet that immersion comes with costs—physical, mental, and financial. Though the technology today is far better than the laggy, monochromatic Nintendo Virtual Boy games that gave people headachesin the 1990s, virtual reality headsets can still fatigue your visual system, he says. VR content can also take a psychic toll. Shooting up bad guys on a video-game console is one thing. But “when you’re using your hands for murder, and you’re feeling haptic feedback as blood spatters on you, it’s just a different category.”
In particular, he has come to believe that experiences worth creating (or recreating) in VR are those that could be described with one or more of the following four adjectives:
Expensive: If it would cost a lot to do something in real life, like visit the statue of David in Florence, Italy, it might make sense to do it virtually.
Dangerous: Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro might be the adventure of a lifetime, but it could also be your last. Several people die on its slopes every year.
Impossible: You can’t travel back in time, grow a third arm, or experience life as a person of a different race or gender. But VR can give you a surprisingly visceral taste of what it would be like if you could.
Rare: You could go whale-watching a dozen times without seeing a humpback breach right next to your boat. Or you could do it once in VR.
Bailenson’s criteria don’t explicitly rule out movies or games as a vehicle for VR experiences. But they imply that even the most basic movie and gaming conventions—world-building, character-drawing, shot-framing, plot exposition—are inessential to this new form. In fact, VR as a medium is a singularly poor fit for linear narrative: The viewers’ ability to look in any direction makes it difficult to focus their attention on any given plot point. “You see these 20-minute VR film trailers emerging for things like Star Wars or The Martian, or stories being told in VR journalism,” Bailenson says. “The market is trying to use the template they have for their old mediums and bring it to VR.”
Jaron Lanier, the VR pioneer who coined the term virtual reality, agrees. “People who are on the inside of VR mostly feel the same way [as Bailenson] about movies and gaming,” Lanier says. “And yet because there’s so much enthusiasm from the movie and the gaming world, and also so much money, it’s a little awkward to say that. But it’s true. They both just seem to really miss the point for people who are experienced in VR.”
See the full story here: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/08/the_only_good_reasons_to_use_virtual_reality_and_the_current_vr_renaissance.html