Drax Interviews Dr. Jeremy Bailenson on the Impact of Virtual Reality on Society

Today, Draxtor Despres interviewed Dr. Jeremy Bailenson, who is a professor of communication at Stanford University and founding director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab. He has written a newly-published book titled Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do, which is an in-depth look at virtual reality and how it can be harnessed to improve our everyday lives. Jeremy said that this interview was the longest time he had ever spent so far in a social VR app!

Among many other things, Drax and Jeremy discussed:

• Treatment of victims of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (e.g. 9/11 survivors) using virtual reality.
• How immersive social VR makes people behave towards each other in a more social manner (use of gestures, etc.). Research seems to indicate that VR tends to change behaviours in a positive way.
• When training a procedural skill, VR tends to outperform simply watching a video. But researchers to date are not seeing gains in STEM education in a VR headset versus non-VR-based learning.

All in all, it was a great interview! Ebbe Altberg, the CEO of Linden Lab (the company behind Second Life and Sansar), joined the interview at the very end.

Here’s the YouTube video of the interview:

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