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My first time on Mars was unforgettable.
After touring every corner of the Earth, living in post-apocalyptic Boston and
studying at a dozen universities, I thought I had seen it all.
But well on the ground on the red planet, driving my rover through the whipping
dust, that giddy feeling of wonder swept over me once again.
Of course, I wasn't actually in any of these places,
but both my brain and my body believed that I was.
And at the end of the day, is there really any difference?
I'm talking, of course, about virtual reality.
Virtual reality has been called many things, from a passing fad, like 3D
television, to the next big computing platform on the level of mobile phones.
By now, many of us have already had the chance to try out VR once or twice.
And have already started to make assumptions about the impact that it may,
or may not have.
But regardless of your stance, if I ask you to picture who's actually using
VR today, most of us will come up with an image like this.
>> [LAUGH]
>> That's me,
someone isolated in their living room, waving their arms furiously
in the air in between sips of Soylent and handfuls of Doritos.
There's a ton of stigma about VR.
People think it's for gamers or claim that it's overhyped or
fear that it's going to have unintended consequences on humanity.
And for the record, I think these are all legitimate concerns.
But looking beyond them, there is so much more to virtual reality and
the promise that it holds.
I believe in the future where VR will be used around the world to improve
people's lives and bring us closer together.
But we are long way away from that right now,
which leads us to the biggest open question facing it today.
What is it really for?
Or perhaps more importantly, what can it be for?
My own obsession with VR lies at the heart of this question.
In my quest to answer it, I've tried to enter VR every single day for
the past few years, even if just for a few minutes at a time.
In that time, I've seen some things. >> [LAUGH]
>> [LAUGH]
>> I've met people and
made real connections.
I've used it as a tool to improve learning and education, and
I've even built new worlds and shared those experience with other people.
But regardless of the specific application, there is one fundamental
concept that makes VR so promising to me, and all of it's enthusiasts.
It's its ability to create presence.
Presence is achieved when your brain truly believes that you no longer just
standing in your bedroom or your living room but somewhere out entirely.
What VR is and will be for is anything that requires presence.
And especially when presence is either expensive or even impossible to achieve.
Consider this, we spend a tremendous amount of time transporting our physical
brains to places that they're not.
Think of multi-hour commutes or
flying around the world just to go to a meeting or two.
Why do we do this?
It's because being face to face with someone,
feeling present in the same room matters.
Video conferencing was heralded as the technology that was going to end
the office as we know it.
But it never delivered on that promise because it couldn't achieve presence.
But what if we could create VR experiences that made you truly feel like you were in
that meeting, with those people?
How would our concept of the commute, or work in general, change?
While presence is foundational,
what is even more exciting is what we can build on top of it.
The research shows that when we're present in VR,
it actually makes us feel like things are happening to us,
as opposed to us just watching them happen to someone else.
And when we can truly believe that we are somewhere, or even someone else, we've
just entered the most powerful vehicle for empathy that we've ever created.
Now, let's pause and reflect for a moment.
Why did you all come here today to watch Loki Notes,
instead of just catching it on YouTube later?
It certainly can't be because of comfort.
I'm sure you couch is much nicer that these chairs and definitely standing.
>> [LAUGH]
>> On almost all metrics,
the at-home experience is better than life, except for one,
we come to live events like these because we want to feel something.
To absorb the energy of the speaker, and the people around us.
To laugh, and to cry,
and to share those feelings with the people sitting next to us.
In these live experiences, it's our presence that powers empathy.
But, we can't always come to live events, just like we can't always fly
around the world to understand how people live their lives.
So to achieve presence, we usually rely on reading stories or watching videos.
But it's one thing to read a story about Italy or
to see a picture of Rome or to even watch a movie like Gladiator.
But it's an entirely different thing to step into Julius Caesar's shoes and
see the world as he did.
The research supports the fact that when we have experiences even if they're
just simulated ones, it makes us much better connect with and understand
that content up to four times more than if were just to read about it or watch it.
So while TV it gives us a window to peer into another world,
VR lets us step into that world and throughly immerse ourselves in it.
It's an entirely new medium for empathetic storytelling.
But what stories can we tell?
Consider Clouds over Sidra, a VR experience built in partnership
with the United Nations and presented at the World Economic Forum.
The mission was to take global leaders and help them better understand
what life is like for a young girl living in a Syrian refugee camp, and
inspire them to start making a difference.
Or consider melting ice, a VR documentary featuring Al Gore that transports
people to the remote parts of the world that are most affected by climate change.
To give them a vivid understanding of the real impact that it's already having.
VR is also being used to combat domestic violence.
In a recent study, researchers have taken men who've committed these acts and
put them in the VR, except in the body of a woman.
The men are then subjected to stimulated domestic violence.
And it’s been proven that it actually makes them more empathetic to the others
around them and will hopefully prevent future incidents.
These are just a few of the examples that are possible now.
And everyday, we are learning more
about how we can use VR as a tool to reimagine empathy.
Well, I'm clearly just a little bit obsessed about VR.
I don't think that it's me or
even anyone in this room who stands the most to gain from it.
VR is going to unlock experiences for
the vast majority of people in this world who don't have access to them right now.
Consider the moment when anyone with a headset can feel they're sitting in
a classroom at a top university, listening to inspiring educators and
having real social interactions with the people next to them.
That's the moment when we've made world-class education available to anyone.
The release of cheap but high quality VR headsets in the coming years will
make it possible for everyone, not just to feel greater empathy, but
to have experiences that were previously impossible for them to have.
So regardless of the opinion about VR, you walked in with here today, I
encourage you to broaden your perspective on what it can and will be for.
Much like how black and white television or the first mobile phone
only hinted at what was to come, VR is still very much in its infancy.
It will take time, but it's a future worth building towards.
And in that future, everyone will have the ability to
feel present anywhere with anyone at any time.
And the human race will be much more connected because of it.
Thank you.
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