Translator: Florencia Farah Reviewer: Denise RQ
Thanks.
Humans have the ability to be in two places at once.
So while you're sitting in your seats, you could go somewhere else in your mind.
But hold on, stay with me for a minute
because I'm going to encourage us all to go together.
Let's travel through time.
Let's use this superpower to go back 40,000 years ago.
Here we see the emergence of the first art: cave paintings.
We see burial tombs and evidence of spiritual beliefs.
All of these things show that humans developed this ability
to entertain ideas of the "not here" and the "not now",
from where they are here and now.
This power that they developed
is really important for our ability to reflect on things.
It's also the basis for telling stories.
This is the birth of stories.
And so, on our time travel journey that we're on right now in the past,
we can also follow and reflect on the development of stories
and the way stories have been delivered
through theater, song, literature, poetry.
And then, over 100 years ago, someone made these images move,
and we were introduced to film, this new type of story telling.
We can look at the development of film as well.
We had these black and white images,
and then, we were introduced to the talkies
we were introduced to technicolor, 3D, HD, surround sound,
computer-generated imagery.
It seems like films were getting more and more realistic.
And this brings us right back to here and now, to the present day,
where we have these realistic stories that we can engage with.
But we won't stay here too long.
Let's time travel again. Let's go back to the time of dinosaurs.
All the way back to the early 1990s.
I'm talking about Jurassic Park,
and I'm going to show you a scene now from Jurassic Park,
where Dr. John Hammond is reflecting--
- he's played by the late Lord Richard Attenborough -
and he's reflecting on his efforts to try and increase realism in entertainment.
And he's talking here to Ellie Sattler, who's played by Laura Dern.
(Jurassic Park original footage) Dr. John Hammond: You know
the first attraction I ever built when I came down from Scotland?
It's a flea circus, Petticoat Lane.
Really quite wonderful.
We had a wee trapeze,
and a carousel,
and a seesaw.
They all moved, motorized of course,
but people would say they could see the fleas.
"Oh, I could see the fleas, mummy! Can't you see the fleas?"
Clown fleas, and high wire fleas, and fleas on parade.
This place…
I wanted to show them something that wasn't an illusion.
Something that was real.
Something that they could see and touch.
An aim not devoid of merit.
Ellie Sattler: But you can't think through this one, John, you have to feel it.
Brendan Rooney: So while John Hammond is being encouraged to feel realism
rather than think his way through it,
only minutes away, watching all of this,
was a young Brendan Rooney, yours truly, but in the cinema.
And it worked.
When I saw Jurassic Park I was blown away.
I got to see dinosaurs for real, in broad daylight.
I got to see Dr. Alan Grant lying on a Triceratops
and touching it with his cheek,
and in a way, I got to feel what that would feel like.
It wasn't all so nice though, I also got to see a Tyrannosaurus Rex
pick up a man, chew him a bit, and then swallow him whole.
I was terrified every time
the Velociraptors would jump out of anywhere,
and this terror kind of made the whole thing better for me.
Meanwhile, beside me in the cinema was,
truth be told, probably shouldn't have been in this film,
but my younger sister was watching all this too.
And while I was thrilled by all of this,
Nuala, on the other hand, was a little overwhelmed.
(Laughter)
This realism that was so great for me was too much for her.
So when were watching these things when we were younger
my granddad used to say,
"You know, it's not real blood, it's just tomato ketchup."
I think we all had that voice in our heads that says,
"No, no, no, it's just tomato ketchup, it's just a film."
Nulla wasn't really listening to that voice at this time,
she tried to go somewhere else in her mind and it wasn't working,
so she literally had to go somewhere else,
she left the cinema and went to some friends in the screen next door
where they were showing "Dennis the Menace."
So my point is that this realism was fantastic for me,
it was magical, and it's what made the film
but for Nulla, maybe traumatic is too strong a word,
but she still remembers it to this day.
And in my work I became interested
in this idea that realism, whatever type of realism,
might interact with our engagement and our emotion towards fiction.
And so here in UCD, in the media lab in the School of Psychology,
I ran some research with colleagues where we showed people horror movie scenes
that were either in 2D or 3D, so people were randomly assigned to a group.
We measured their physiological responses while they watched these.
We measured their skin conductance and their heart rate.
These tell us slightly different things about emotional experience.
Skin conductance is tied to our emotional arousal,
whereas heart rate is tied
both to our emotional arousal and to our ability to pay attention,
focus, and calm ourselves down.
We found that in participants in both groups,
there was no significant difference in their skin conductance.
But those in the 3D group had a significantly higher heart rate
than those in the 2D group.
It appears that both groups were feeling this strong intense emotional arousal,
but the 3D group were less able to calm themselves down.
That voice saying "it's just ketchup" wasn't as convincing.
I was interested more in this idea that we might control our experience,
so I conducted further studies here in UCD
and in the Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology,
where we showed people either short films or film scenes
and we gave them one of two sets with instructions.
We told them they should either try and be really involved in the experience,
try and feel feelings as much as they can,
or in the detached condition,
we told them to try and remain as detached as possible,
to try and not feel anything at all.
We measured their physiological responses in those studies,
but afterwards we also asked them, "What strategies did you employ?"
"How did you achieve the instructions?"
We found that in the involved condition
they said things like, "I tried to imagine it was happening to me,"
"I put myself into the characters' shoes."
In the detached condition, they said things like,
"I just reminded myself it was just a film."
It's that voice again that's trying to distance or calm themselves down.
They said, "I tried to focus on the technical aspects of the experience,
maybe the lighting or the acting."
So it'd seem that people in their head were trying to turn up or down
their psychological distance to the experience,
or the internal realism they were perceiving.
We also asked them, "Do you think you were very successful?"
"How do you think you did it?" "Was it hard?"
People in the detached condition said,
"Yeah, it was really hard, I had these strategies but to be honest,
I just got lost in the film, I wasn't really able to do it."
In the involved condition, people said things like,
"Yeah, I had strategies but I was able to just sit back and let it do its thing,
the film kind of took over in the dark room."
Our visual system on our brain is designed to make sense of the received information,
and if we see an explosion on a screen,
our visual system receives information that is very similar
to that if we were faced with an explosion in real life.
This is what makes film so powerful,
so useful, so interesting and enjoyable.
It presents us with real experiences that are safe,
experiences we can control in some ways.
It's like this sandbox for our emotions.
And this is how film allows us to go on a journey while we stay in our seats.
Only recently I was able to go to Mars,
I traveled through space and I was able to see Mars,
it was really nice, I hadn't seen Mars before.
I got to visit Mark Watney, he looked a little bit like Matt Damon.
(Laughter)
But I think I had a better time than he did,
because he was stuck there.
So, I've been talking about how film has changed.
Recently, Facebook acquired a company called "Oculus VR",
and Samsung, HTC, Google, Sony are all developing
these virtual reality headsets.
They'll be available for household use in a matter of months.
If you haven't had the opportunity to try one of these,
you should do it, they're amazing, magical devices, they really are.
In his TED talk, Chris Milk talked about the work he's doing with his company Vrse
in creating these fully immersive films where people can step into the story.
It seems forms of entertainment like film and video games
are becoming virtual, this next step in the trajectory of realism.
It's really exciting, I don't know if you can tell,
but I'm really excited about this.
We should just do it, I want holodecks to be a thing as soon as possible.
We don't have to reflect on this, right? I mean, how real can films get?
Before we all get lost,
I want us to think about this other story.
It's a story about a professor in Stanford University, Philip Zimbardo,
who, in the basement of the Psychology Department,
created this virtual world.
In an effort to study human behavior, he created this prison.
He built it up like a prison, and he got volunteer students
to be assigned these roles of either prisoner or guard.
They took on these roles,
and the whole thing was so compelling, so realistic
that they kind of got lost in this virtual reality.
This conflict grew between the two groups: the guards became abusive,
one prisoner in an effort to try and protest this;
this student wanted out,
but he decided it was best to go on hunger strike
rather than leave the experiment.
He thought he was a real prisoner.
That means he was a real prisoner.
This experience for those students was emotionally traumatic;
is not too strong a word in this case.
And we need to reflect on this.
But remember I said we can be in two places at one time.
I don't want you to think that I'm saying this realistic technology is a bad thing.
Reliably, technological revolutions like these are faced
with fear, anxiety, and moral panic.
And I don't think they're helpful,
I think that can cloud our ability to reflect on a situation,
in the same way overzealous excitement can.
One of the greatest things about the work that Chris Milk is doing
is he's making these immersive films and working with the UN
to try and move people's emotions and people in power who can make decisions
and try and increase their empathy.
And this supports my belief
that getting lost and being completely immersed
in one of these experiences is really beneficial for us.
I believe that these technologies can allow us to develop skills
that are psychologically healthy and useful.
We can learn about the world around us,
and we can learn about ourselves, about our own emotions and how they work.
At the same time, if we super charge the power of film, we need to be mindful
that these experiences may be overwhelming in some circumstances;
maybe some people will be vulnerable,
or need support or guidance, or ways to get home.
I fully believe that we need to empower people
to see the dinosaurs up-close,
to visit Mark Watney and Mars, and touch a Triceratops with your cheek,
because this way,
we can learn about other places, other times, and other people.
And in doing that, we are also learning about here, and now, and ourselves.
But these lessons on those journeys are of no use to us
if we don't have a way to come back.
Thank you.
(Applause)