What if virtual reality wasn’t just a new way to play games or watch movies? What if the technology wasn’t just creating new methods of communication, of medical treatment, of military training?
What if virtual reality was used in the pursuit of mayhem?
Much has been said about the positives of technology that can reshape reality or even create a new one, but last month two respected academic researchers held a talk at South by Southwest in Austin to explore not just those positives, but also the potential negatives of reality technology.
“This is a scene from a movie from the 1940s called Gaslight,” Todd Richmond told the packed room, pointing to a screen showing a man and a woman standing by an old gaslight in a home. “How many people know what gaslighting is? So the term gaslighting comes from when lights used to be gas fueled. And it’s a way of driving someone into mental distress by manipulating their environment without telling them and then denying that it’s being manipulated. So the classic, the gaslight lamp lighting is that you slowly turn down the lights on your spouse because you’re trying to drive your spouse nuts. Your spouse says, ‘Is it getting darker?’ And you say, ‘No, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ And if you do that enough over time, you would begin to freak people out.
“So is VR the perfect platform for this? The answer is, yeah, if you’re going to use it for that.”
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A scene from the movie Gaslight / MGM
Richmond, who heads up the University of Southern California’s mixed reality lab, said that the teams there have been doing some “anecdotal stuff” to test out the possibilities and extent of VR gaslighting.
“As humans, our vision systems have evolved to a point where we have very high resolution in the front, wherever we’re looking,” he said. “We have very low resolution on the periphery, but motion in the periphery is something that we pick up on because that’s a threat. Our perception systems have evolved to do that.
“I’ve been looking at this idea of what if in VR, we put something in your peripheral motion but then when you turn to look at it, it continues to move so it never leaves your peripheral motion? I’m convinced that you wouldn’t be happy in that for more than about three minutes.”
It’s not, he said, because the technology is directly scaring you, like with an image or video. It’s because it is manipulating your brain into thinking you’re being threatened in a very subtle way and the technology is never removing that threat.
The lack of control, or agency, over that threat, is what would substantially get under your skin.
THE GOOD
Earlier in the talk, entitled AR/VR: The Promise and Danger Behind the Hype, USC’s director of medical virtual reality Skip Rizzo walked through some of the long-running benefits of the technology.
Despite undergoing a nuclear winter, a period of time in the ‘90s defined by the first substantial attempt at the commercialization of VR and then a precipitous drop in its popularity, virtual reality never really went away. Instead the technology slipped out of the limelight created by entertainment products and instead delivered decades of use in the fields of medicine and the military.
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“You could put someone in a virtual environment, let them interact in a 3D space, and actually change how their brain functions, particularly with mental rotation,” he said. “After just 12 to 15 minutes of interaction for some, you’ll see giant gains in that mental capability.”
By 2004, the team had expanded its work, adding a number of different sorts of projects including one that dealt with the treatment of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In that particular program, a child with ADHD would be placed in a virtual classroom and then distracted with things like flying paper airplanes and the arrival of a school bus. It was a powerful tool for assessment, he said.
In 2009, they added the Kinect to a VR kit and started to use it to treat stroke victims to help them regain some function through rehab work. Four years later, and they were using VR and AI to help teach social workers how to deal with difficult, virtual patients. In a recent study, they used a more advanced version of the software to help people gain the ability to do better job interviews with virtual future bosses.
Then the sudden success of Palmer Luckey, and Facebook’s $2 billion purchase of his company in 2014, brought virtual reality back into the mainstream, primarily through games.
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“I’ll be willing to go so far as to say that we’re really proud to be able to say we can change the brain,” Rizzo responded. “We can change behavior, do positive things to make a difference for people with disabilities or mental health conditions and all of that. But if you’re going to say that, you’ve got to accept the flip side of the coin.
“This stuff can be used in ways that change us, especially immersive interactivity. We have to watch out for this. It’s why IEEE ethics is a big deal.”
Source: Polygon