How Virtual Reality Can Teach us How to Die Better

My name is Jeremy Bailenson, and since 1999, I’ve been building immersive virtual reality, putting people inside VR and testing what happens to the brain, how people use VR and which applications work.

I’m very appreciative to be here today and to talk to you about this technology and how we can think about it in terms of the end of life.

Three goals for today.

Number one, all of us walk out of here understanding how virtual reality works from a technological standpoint.

Number two, we go over some examples of how I’ve used VR in the last two decades to solve some pretty hard psychological problems.

Number three, we all brainstorm about applying this amazing technology to designing the end of life. There’s a lot of real action there, and I’m really hoping some conversations flow out of this.

Can we start by raising your hand if you’ve ever been in virtual reality before?

About half of you.

Raise your hand if you’ve been in VR and gotten to walk around.

Okay, about 10% of you. Fantastic.

I’m going to flash you back to the year 2001.

My PhD was in cognitive psychology. In 1999, I left that field to learn how to build VR and test its effects on people.

In 2001, we flew to Washington, D.C., for a conference at the Federal Judicial Center, where we were trying to figure out how one might apply virtual reality to the courtroom. For example, recreating crime scenes or having witnesses look at suspects in police lineups.

We flew all of our super-heavy equipment across the country from Santa Barbara, where I was doing my postdoc, and gave this demo on-site in D.C.

We had a federal judge put on the goggles, and we gave him our best demo.

For those of you who come to my lab, the best demo for showing how amazing VR is is what we call “the pit.”

In that demo, you put on the goggles, look around and see a 3D model of the room. It looks just like you’re here. You walk around and say, “Oh, that’s neat.”

Then we hit a button, and we drop a chasm. That chasm is about 10 meters deep and about three meters across. We put a little rickety plank over it.

The point of this demo is that it feels so real to be there. It’s an amazing experience.

This judge was in a room about this size. About 500 high-end lawyers and judges were watching. He was crossing the plank and stepped just a little bit to the left, off the board.

We’re tracking gravity. So when he steps off, based on what his eyes are telling his brain and what his ears are hearing through spatialized sound, he feels like he’s plummeting to the bottom of that chasm.

If you were in the real world and fell off that plank, how would you save your life?

You would dive at a 45-degree angle to try to catch the lip of that edge as it started moving away from you.

So this federal judge, in the middle of a room just like this, decided to dive at a 45-degree angle into the air.

It gets worse.

This was my first public demo. I’ve since given thousands per year.

The computer was sitting on a table with a really sharp corner. I was a 26-year-old postdoc, and I basically had one move, which was to smash into him and redirect his trajectory so his face didn’t hit the corner.

He was fine. He was a good sport about it. We didn’t get sued. We didn’t go to jail.

The reason I waste two of your valuable minutes on this story is that psychologists call this presence.

Presence is defined as the illusion of nonmediation.

When VR is done well, there are no pixels, no field of view and no gadgets. It’s just an experience that you have.

Everything I’m going to talk about for the rest of this lecture takes as an assumption that VR is so real that the front of your brain can say, “This is not real. This is not real.”

But the back of your brain, the part that’s in charge of keeping you alive, cannot overcome the illusion.

Here’s my lab at Stanford. It’s an amazing technological lab. We’ve got a great tracking system to measure your movements. We’ve got a floor that shakes. We’ve got 24 speakers that can move around the room. We do virtual scent now.

We get visits from heads of state. We get visits from the U.S. military and from CEOs who are evaluating whether they should use VR for their companies.

Now that I’ve bragged about my lab, let me convince you that it is becoming completely obsolete from a technological standpoint.

Of all the papers I’ve published over the last two decades, about three-quarters of them were done using the goggles you see on the right. Each one of them cost more than my car.

I drive a Ford C-Max, so maybe that doesn’t say all that much, but $40,000 was the typical price tag for head-mounted displays historically.

Now that Facebook, Samsung, Google, HTC and Sony are in the game, goggles are $100 or $200.

We’ve gone from there being, at the peak five or seven years ago, maybe 1,000 or 2,000 headsets in the world, to tens of millions of them.

This is Popper. Popper turned 93 two days ago, and in this picture, he was 90.

Like those of you who raised your hands, when I put Popper in VR, he looked around and said, “You know, this is kind of cool, but really, what’s the point? What am I supposed to do in here? What’s the point?”

What we’re going to talk about for the rest of today is what makes a good use case for VR.

Good use cases for VR, in my opinion, are things that leverage a paradox.

The paradox is this: The brain treats VR as real. Remember that judge who dove at a 45-degree angle. But you can do anything.

If a programmer can imagine a simulation, you can go back in time. You can grow a third arm. You can be a different age or a different gender. You can break physics. You can create these fantastical experiences, but the brain treats them as if they were real.

This is where VR really earns its keep.

VR is not for everything.

I’m a VR guy. I’ve done nothing but study VR for the last two decades, and I don’t use it at home. I don’t play video games. I don’t have a Facebook account.

Five years from now, if you guys are checking your email in VR, then I’ve failed miserably as an evangelist.

It’s not for that. It’s for very special experiences.

I’m going to give you an example.

The first industry grant I got at Stanford was from a company called Cisco. A woman named Marcos Taos Key came to the lab, put on the goggles and tried the demo I’m about to show you.

It’s a virtual mirror, and the virtual mirror leverages two types of psychological theories.

The first is called the contact hypothesis.

In the 1960s, when schools were segregated, psychologists and sociologists came up with a theory that said, you know, if we get people who are different and just put them together, they’re going to learn to get along.

That’s a simplification of the theory, but the general idea is that physical contact with people who are different will eventually cause you to get along with the out-group.

The second theory leverages something called body transfer.

Body transfer is a neuroscientific principle that if I move physically and see an avatar, a digital representation of myself, move with me, then after about four minutes of moving my arm and seeing that avatar move with me, the brain treats that avatar as if it were part of me.

From a neuroscience standpoint, when I think of myself, a part of the brain lights up. When I see my avatar, the same part lights up.

In other words, that avatar becomes us.

Now I’m going to show you a movie. Please don’t laugh at it. It’s 15 years old.

This was the first VR demo we ever built to join those two theories. Instead of being around someone who’s different, what if you become them?

This is Nick Yee, the genius who did a lot of this early work starting around 2003.

He’s moving around the physical room. He walks up to a mirror. In the experiment, he does this for about two or three minutes. You’re only going to see it for about 10 seconds.

He moves his head to the left, and the avatar moves with him. He continues doing a series of physical movements and sees the synchronous movements of the avatar.

He bends down. We hit a button. He comes up, and now he’s a woman of color.

The reaction you get when your body changes and you become someone else is very intense.

Our experiments over the last 15 years have shown that when you become someone else, whether a different age, race, gender or species, the experience can cause you to behave differently.

Compared with watching a video or doing role-playing, becoming someone else and experiencing trauma firsthand causes changes in attitudes and behavior that are stronger than other treatments people have tried in the past.

To give an example, Fernanda Herrera, a fourth-year PhD student in my lab, worked on this project for the last three years, and it was published a week ago.

In this study, she had people become homeless.

They found out how situational factors can cause you to lose your home. You lose your job. You try to sell things in your apartment, but you can’t make enough money. You get evicted. You try sleeping in your car.

It’s an intense embodied experience where you become homeless and feel what it’s like to be harassed on the street.

What Fernanda studies is whether, compared with lots of control conditions, you are willing afterward to sign a petition saying, “I’m willing to have my own personal taxes increased in order to support affordable housing measures.”

She actually has them physically sign a real petition.

What she discovered is that even two months later, compared with a control condition, becoming homeless causes more behavior change than role-playing.

These are the types of studies we do.

We can also study empathy, not toward others, but toward ourselves.

Hal Hershfield is now a professor in the business school at Stanford. His dissertation was about connecting with your future self.

He took people in their 20s, brought them to the lab and scanned their bodies. They walked up to that virtual mirror and did body transfer with their age-appropriate selves.

Then we hit a button and used computer graphics to age them so they got to meet themselves when they were going to be 70.

In other words, they got to become their future selves and experience that.

What Hal cares about is financial planning for the future.

He gave these subjects the option of taking $20 now, or waiting and putting it into a savings account to get $40 later, along with similar treatments.

To make a long story short, across dozens of experiments, Hal demonstrated that becoming older in the virtual mirror causes you to defer gratification and increase financial savings.

We are in a huge crisis in this country. People in their 20s are not putting any money in the bank. They’re also going to live until they’re 90, so there’s going to be this 30- or 40-year period when they’re in poverty.

We’re now working with a lot of financial institutions to help them use this principle in their systems to help people save money.

The first to market was Bank of America.

They figured out how to scan your face through the camera in a laptop. If you open a new Bank of America account, you’ll be asked, “Do you want to do Face Retirement?”

If you say yes, it will scan your face, and your future self becomes part of your banking interface.

With every financial decision you make, your future self is staring at you. The more money you put into savings, the happier your future self gets.

At Stanford, we like to call this win-win. Bank of America is going to get more money in its accounts, and people in their 20s are not going to be in poverty decades from now.

We took this principle to Fidelity, and we’re working with Fidelity.

One of my graduate students is named Derek Belch. Derek formed a company called STRIVR, and he’s using VR to help companies help people with lots of issues, including those around the end of life.

Imagine you’re at a call center, and you’re trying to advise someone over the phone about how to invest their life savings or what percentage to take out of their paycheck.

We’ve used VR to train people in call centers. While they’re in the call center, they hit a button, and then they’re in the living room of the person they’re advising.

They see that she has crutches and can’t walk. They see the stack of bills in front of her on the table.

Since Fidelity started using this, customer service evaluations of people in call centers have gone up 10%.

This experience of becoming someone else and feeling what it’s like helps people in call centers give better advice to those saving for their futures.

At Stanford, there are doctors named Andrew Dubin, Lauren Schneider and Lauren Sacks who are building a conversational simulator.

Imagine you’re a doctor. You’re a pediatric heart surgeon, and you’re sitting across the table from a parent. You have to tell the parent their child is going to die.

There’s no practice for this.

That moment is going to be etched in the mind of that parent forever. But these interns who are training for this get thrown into a real situation, and they’ve never gotten to try.

What we’ve built is a difficult-conversation trainer where these doctors practice delivering news about the end of life.

Our first study showed really good results. These people are now more prepared to have an actual conversation.

I want to talk about scale.

Derek’s company, STRIVR, just signed a contract to put four virtual reality training systems in every single one of Walmart’s 4,700 stores.

There were 200,000 Walmart employees trained in VR last year. This year, we are going to have over a million practicing difficult conversations so they get better at their jobs.

If we come up with an application about the end of life, it can scale.

Where do you want to die? Who do you want to be there? What do you want to say?

The reason we have virtual reality is because of the flight simulator.

Why do we have a flight simulator?

Practice.

We learn by doing, making mistakes, getting feedback, doing it again and improving.

Why not do this for end-of-life decisions?

There are a number of companies and academics building these practice simulations for the end of life.

There’s a study that came out three weeks ago by Mel Slater, where he and his colleagues had subjects literally experience their own deaths and then figure out how they were going to change their lives afterward.

It showed lots of positive effects.

On that note, I’m going to conclude and thank you for your attention.

This is my book, Experience on Demand.

VR is not for everything. If there’s one thing I would urge you to remember, it’s that VR is an experience.

Experiences can produce change, but it really depends on what you do with virtual reality.

Thank you for your attention. I appreciate it.