“Empathy at Scale” What a delightful title for the new project at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL.) The project “seeks to design, test, and distribute virtual reality interventions that teach empathy.” The idea is that when people experience life through someone else’s eyes, they develop a more empathetic attitude toward them. The project is notable in that it is reaching outside the usual academic testing demographic of 20-something college students who want to earn $50 in a study. Instead, the project will collect data from around 1,000 participants who are ‘demographically diverse.” [Read more…]
Ocean acidification as a personal experience
In this video Jeremy Bailenson of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab briefly describes how virtual reality works and then explains how it is being used to give a personal experience of climate change. [Read more…]
Virtual reality promises effective treatment of anxiety disorders
This 2011 paper analyzes the results of 608 studies to compare the effectiveness of traditional anxiety disorder treatment vs virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET.) The results of VRET were by far more effective than being on the waitlist. No surprise there. VRET was also shown to be just as effective in it’s effect on people’s lives, and just as stable in it’s results over time as traditional therapies. [Read more…]
Young students learn better with mix of virtual and real worlds
Carnegie Mellon’s NoRilla project is a mixed-reality education platform to assist with science learning in young students. It makes use of a “depth camera” (Microsoft Kinect) to give personalized feedback.
From the conclusion of 2015 experiment: “Mixed-reality games that support physical observation in the real world have a great potential to enhance learning and enjoyment for young children.”
Source: http://thejournal.com/articles/2015/05/11/young-students-learn-better-with-mix-of-virtual-and-real-worlds.aspx?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed