diplomacy. that all happens tonight on c-span2's booktv, 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. television for serious readers. and now peter rubin of "wired" magazine reports on virtual reality and the impact it'll have on entertainment, work and human emotions and interaction. he's in conversation with second life founder phillip rosedale. >> well, those were some terrifying steps. hi, everyone. hello. [inaudible conversations] thank you so much for being here. >> this is great. i have never gotten a chance to do this, to be at a bookstore, at a book event. >> join the club, man. >> this is your fist time? [laughter] >> like this, yes. >> i feel better.

>> i've been to bookstore events -- [inaudible conversations] >> you're probably right. >> could be this one. [inaudible conversations] aha. >> now talk. >> how about now? is that a little better? no? [inaudible conversations] >> you know, as the world becomes virtual which which is,f course, the or very, well, bug subject of peter's book, it's so interesting that we're starting to do things like this a bit in virtual reality, and it is always so interesting to compare what happens, you know, in the real world to what is increasingly happening now in virtual worlds. so that's just a trip -- >> it's true, yeah. i've actually just last week i did a reading and q&a in virtual reality in a multi-user environment called rec room. and i was holding a microphone,

and if i wasn't holding the microphone, people wouldn't have been able to hear my voice coming out of the speakers that were built into this virtual environment. what i was holding in real life was just a controller, a hand controller that i would use in any other way. but by pressing a button, i was glibbing the object -- gripping the object that was in front of me. then there was the mic, then it activated the pa system that had been coded into this room. so for me, it was just like i was sitting here holding a hand up to my face. people who were sitting there, each one of you would have been sitting or standing at home, wherever you were, with a headset on. you all would have been looking at a stage where something that was very cartoonish but still looks a little bit like me was up there with a mic talking. and the question and answers were just like question and answers. it was really remarkable. >> how, how many of you guys

have tried, you know, a v.r. headset yet? so just about everybody. and hen how many of you -- and then how many of you have done one of the pc ones like the oculus rift or the htc vibe? less, interesting. >> menlo park, man. >> that's true, we are in the motherland. so, yeah, and you've probably got an idea -- well, actually, then the final question is and this may be more for me or, well, both of us, how many of you have done that in a social setting; that is, using one of those devices, spoken to another human being in a virtual world? that's cool. >> the numbers keep going down. i'm glad to see some, yeah. >> so, i mean, peter's book, it dwells on the question, wouldn't you say really, of what is going to happen to us and what the world is going to be like, you know, more as it relates to the

experience of presence, of course, future presence. presence is used not only as this expression for making you feel present in another space, another world by having your eyes and your ears, i guess, fooled in a good way but fooled completely into believing that you're there, and there's also this idea of presence which very much relates to my own work about making us feel like we're actually together in a space. and, i mean, that's a big piece of this. >> yeah, absolutely. it, a shortened term or a shortened version of telepresence which is something that's maybe a bit more widely known in larger technological circles, anything from working remotely is telepresence, but it emerged more recently, and it's been studied kind of academically for 25 years or more under the term presence, but it really began to become a

fixed, more explicitly -- affixed more explicitly to v.r. with the kind of rebirth of the technology. there were a lot of other words that were used in the '90s when this first kind of got our attention from a consumer perspective. people talked about the conversion moment as that being the thing where your brain clicked into believing in the virtual world. but presence kind of came back into vogue, and there was always something kind of beautiful about that phrase to me. because it really, it wasn't about tricking you, it was more just about you are in one place, and now you're in another place. >> and as you were saying, when i was a kid i actually got the presence journal, mit, when did it start? >> '92. >> so '92 you had these crazy people writing a journal about this word, and it was called presence. can you believe that, you know? so long -- what would you say is different now, as a starting

point, what is different now about this v.r. thing since it's been something that crazy people in silicon valley have been doing for, like, 30 years now? >> longer. i mean, when you go back to the military and academic labs, i mean, you're looking at the late '60s as the first time someone tried to kind of put a head-mounted display in front of someone's face. a lot of credence is given to the advent of the smartphone, right? because all of a sudden you had all these manufacturers that found a reason to make displays that were high quality but still small, and you had the kind of ongoing miniaturization of hardware. so on the technical side, all of a sudden the things that weren't fast enough or were too big to do in the '90s became not just cheaper and accessible, but you could pack them into a really small package. and so there were some labs throughout the kind of 2000s

and the early 2010s that were finding these kind of open source solutions to putting these things together. and then what changed everything was it kind of latching on to the world of video games. and that got people's attention. and 2012 is the first time anyone heard the phrase oculus rift which at the time, you know, was a ski mask strap attached to a bunch of duct tape and cheap magnifying lenses. and it didn't start there, but that certainly made a lot of people's ears perk up. >> and, indeed, one of the gods of video gaming, at least from my perspective as a developer, is a guy named john carmack and he kind of video game god wrote something where -- or saw palm orer's gadget or heard about it and -- >> sent a copy. >> right. and he said sounds like it's pretty good, right?

and palmer put the whole thing, the only version of his duct-taped masterpiece in a box and sent it in the mail to john because he was so amazed that the god of gaming was blessing him with, you know, being interested in this thing. >> yeah. john carmack kind of famously had, was one of the people that was responsible for games like doom, things that revolutionized the video game world because it allowed for a three-dimensional experience. he takes this headset in 2012 to the same game show he'd been going to for years and years and years and years and showed a few people this, and then word got out very quickly. i wasn't able to see it that year, but the next year when i went back, there was a little company that had formed around the idea of the oculus, and that's when i saw it. >> how many people were of course you plus when you got -- oculus when you got the demo of it? >> when i got there, it was just me and, at the time, the ceo. but in the company there were

probably 15 people, maybe fewer. >> that's amazing. >> yeah. i mean, the first five or six of them, one tragically has passed away since then. >> right. >> but, yeah, the first five or six or seven of them were kind of responsible for in that single year bringing this thing kind of out to a generation of kickstarter early adopters. >> yeah. my own work having been in virtual worlds all my life with second life, i was not doing, i was not working on virtual reality or virtual worlds at that time. but the chip, the chips that are in our phones now, as you said, came out that were capable of tracking the motion of our heads. and i got one of these little chips and hooked it up to an asill lo scope because i'm an electronics guy, that's my background, and i had a little board with a chip on it, and i

turned it in my fingers, you know, watching the trace go up and down. and i could tell it was so accurate, so fast and so accurate that i just was like, oh, my god, this is the thing that all us v.r. nuts have wanted, you know, for as far back as we can remember. and i called my little team over and i said, we're shutting this company down, and we're giving our investors or their money back, and we're going back into v.r., and that was 2012, so it was the same time. >> yeah. that's when it really all came together. and for someone like me who had grown up reading stories that imagined not just cyberspace, but virtual reality and movies that, as terrible as they were, captured my imagination, things like lawnmower man and johnny mnemonic, i mean, the movies of my teen years, i was absolutely captivated not just by how ridiculously kind of paleofuturist they seem to us now, how cool they looked from the outside, but then the

renditions of what was happening inside the headset. i was completely swept away. and despite that, and despite the fact that in the '90s there were some rudimentary experiences people could have, i never, ever tried it. i didn't, like, my eyes didn't go into a headset until 2013. and so i felt like that 15, 16-year-old me all of a sudden was like, oh, right. and not only that, but, like, this feels real. this doesn't feel like sci-fi. and i went back to work, and i was like you are probably not going to believe me because we've heard this story before, but v.r.'s actually coming. and they were like, yeah, right. this is "wired," right? we've heralded the birth a few times and were very wrong. and i was like, no, no, no, no, i think this is it. at the time that was just based on video gapes, but very, very quickly -- games, but very, very

quickly my excitement about what the technology was doing was shifted focus. and the idea of escapism and game-based entertainment was completely supplanted by this idea that when you were in there with someone else, emotional tenor of an experience changedderder revocably. and that only was what you were doing vivid just like anything is vivid and immersive based on v.r. technology, but by virtue of sharing that, the two of you might not experience the exact same thing, but you both left with this kind of incredible lasting memory of having done it with another person. and so anything you do in v.r., as a lot of you who have done this may well know, your memory of having done it isn't putting

on a headset and sitting in a room. it's of doing the thing that you were doing in there, right? and it turns out that your brain actually accesses the memories the same way it accesses real life memories. it takes a little longer to access a memory of something you've done in v.r. than of trying to identify something you've seen in a photograph because it's buried in a different place, and it's a little deeper. and so you leave with kind of incredible memory of an experience, and it's a shared experience. finish and -- and so even games companies at this point, i think, have recognized that. and it's very rare to find even just a game that is just you by yourself. >> let's unpack that. i mean, there's a couple of great things there. you've written about a bunch of them here. i made a bunch of notes in the book myself as i -- >> i can vouch. i see a lot of underlines, check marks. i see an angry face? what's that about? [laughter] >> no, i don't think there's an angry face. >> no, there's no angry face.

i hope there's not an angry face. >> the memory palace, you write about memory, and i think that's something that i've thought a lot about too, this idea that we store our memories best when they're presented spatially, right? >> absolutely. >> that's one of the things that is super fascinating about v.r. that peter writes about here. our ability to recollect things is markedly improved by remembering them in the context of a familiar place. and, of course, what's, you know, what's more familiar and will become even more familiar than sort of putting this headset on and being in a space? we're going to lay out our screens around us, read our e-mail on the walls and just doing that is going to improve our memory of things. that's the fascinating finish. >> certainly. i mean, if you've ever, if anyone has ever read or heard from a person who actually is a competitive memory champion, i think franklin ford did years

ago, but the trick to memorizing a deck of cards is every card you kind of unpack and you give it a different image. and so you kind of -- rather than trying to remember the order of the cards and what those cards were, you're remembering a series of events which is much easier for people to do. oh, the blue elephant walked that way and slipped on a mango, and that becomes three of diamonds, king of hearts. and is -- and when you add to that this thing called embodiment, and that is the thing that i was describing when i did this reading in v.r., a lot of us in the very kind of lightweight headsets, the things that are driven by phones and will be stand-alone devices very soon, if you're in kind of a 360-degree video, you're essentially a disembodied camera, right? you can look around, but if you look down, you don't see down ay and just like i did you have your hands and you can use your

hands, you're not, this is not a mediated form of communication anymore, right? you're in there, and you are doing the things. and so we've always kind of used these metaphors of control when we're interacting with digital worlds, keys and buttons and thumb sticks. those are gone. so you're reaching out and you're grabbing things, and you're handing things and contacting other people. and so by virtue of that embodiment, the memory becomes that much stronger. and then a whole lot of other things, as i'm sure we'll get into, the kind of tricks you can play on the psyche with that are amazing. >> what about this space between us that you've written so much about. like when we communicate in v.r., you know, i remember that jared lanier, i actually saw him last night, talked to him about all this stuff out at his place, and we were catching up. he actually told me that the first v.r. device was not the

sort of damocles, but that earlier in the '50s there was a v.r. thing for cats. >> i'm sorry, what? >> cats. >> okay. i've heard -- something called a sensor-ama. >> it was like a headset that was being used to study cats by presenting them with simple lines and images and stuff, and this was, like, in the 50s. >> that is maybe the most lanier thing i've ever heard. >> exactly right. [laughter] but jarrin and i used to debate how many bits for seconding are -- per second are moving between us right now. where do you think is working and not working in terms of face to face communication kind of in summary in v.r.? >> i will say this to start out with, not only do i lack the technical knowledge to talk about it in bits, but i think even if i did, i would have skirted kind of a wide berth

around that. i'm trying to like -- i'm a culture writer, right? i'm not a tech writer. so when i became fascinated by v.r., what became fascinating about it was a holistic experience. and i can, you know, i know what goes into it, you know? like you said, you're an engineer and physics and all these other things, so you have made kind of an incredible career out of understanding both the left brain and the right brain parts of this. i only have one of those, and i don't even remember which side of my brain it is. [laughter] so when i think about what we're doing now, if we were to be a approximating this in virtual reality, the only things that we would really have in there being tracked would be our heads and our hands. and so you would be doing this, and what i would see is you would have your hand to your chin, and you would be nodding your head. so that would some through. so your facial expression for the most part would be approximated, neutral or based on the sound of your voice, it might be given some emotion.

our bodies would be extrapolated. based on where your hands were and your body, the placement of your arms and maybe the rest of your body. in some platforms say the legs, that's too much. so they'd just give you -- you'd have a torso and ands hands or a torso, head, arms and hands. so right now we're dealing with, you know, what we can muster the ability to render. but what's remarkable is how many gaps your brain fills in. and as a very quick example of that before i get back to the rest of the question is there are some early kind of orientation demos that headset manufacturers have made for when you put on one of their headsets in the first time. and in one of those you're standing in front of a mirror, and what you are changes. you could be a red balloon, or it could be a skeleton, but no matter what it is if you are turning your head and tilting it and your reflection is doing exactly that, you're going to see yourself in a featureless

balloon. you're going to see yourself in a skull. you're going to see yourself in kind of a metal sun icon. so it doesn't take much for me to see you in this assemblage of parts, right? because your voice is coming through. and your mannerisms are coming through. what you do with your hands when you're listening and the way you nod, if i only knew you in v.r. and we were having this conversation and then we satsome and we were talking, i would be like, of course, this feels very natural to me. i feel like we've spent time together before because the nonverbal stuff comes through. >> you should relate the story of the people that you got a chance to meet after they had met and perhaps dated when first starting to know each other, i think, in rec room. >> that's a great idea, i'll do that. so one of, one of the -- it's not the most ambitious multi-user v.r. things out there, but a popular one.

it's called rec room, and when i first started connecting with people in there as a journalist not just as someone who was terrible at playing paintball in there, i met someone who said, you know what? a couple people in my friend group, one is actually going to go visit the other. and i said, well, as a reporter that is exactly the kind of thing i like to hear. and so i spent a little time with these two people in v.r. and the thing that struck me about them then was the comfort that they had with one another. because, you know, these are embodied avatars. so there was one moment i remember so strongly that we are, we're just happening out in a very kind of neutral environment. it's kind of like a game room, and people can sit around and play cards or just sit around, and there's a little stage and you can play charades, and there are all these tools you can use in there. and i was talking to a guy and his name was ben. and as i was talking to him, his

friend -- a woman named priscilla -- she was taking post-it notes, writing on them with a pen in v.r. and then sticking it to his avatar one at a time. she would walk up and put another post-it note on. and as time went on, she had made a bikini out of these post-it notes and stuck it -- sorry -- and stuck it on this guy chest. and it wasn't just the shape, it was what she had drawn on them was effectively kind of a bikini top. and this very casual intimacy that was already part of their relationship struck me immediately. fast forward a few weeks later, and bened had driven from -- ben had driven from his home in cincinnati to alabama to visit priscilla. and they had spent a few days together by the time that i connected with them on a skype video call. and there are two things about that that are still kind of with

me. one is when you do a skype video call or facetime with someone, you're never looking at each other. if they're trying to look at you, then they're looking at a camera lens. and if they're looking at what they see as you, then your eyes are always, they're always doing this. so there's no actual connection. so something is lost in that mediation. so not only was that happening between me on one end and ben and priscilla on the other, but they were sitting according to, like, the decorum of the real world and people who hadn't spent much physical time together. so there was a tinemy bit -- tiny bit of awkwardness that i could see. and i didn't know if that was because they were feeling out the early stages in their relationship or if they had kind of regressed back to the social code of being effectively strangers.

but it really set into relief for me what is enabled in vice president r., and since -- in v.r., and since then i've learned partially it was because they weren't necessarily the match that they thought they might be and, in fact, priscilla ended up marrying someone else that she had met in that world. and that's covered in the chapter in the book. but we did an excerpt of this or an adaptation of this chapter in the april issue of "wired," and we made it much more about the wedding that then happened. so it's kind of the fast forward to this other relationship. so if you have read that piece in the magazine, then book chapter is a prequel. if you have not read the magazine piece and you read the book, then you'll get a nice coe that at the -- coda at the end. but it really is the thing that holds true still from that very first time i saw this arise is

that the cable intimacy -- the casual intimacy, it's the kind you don't get getting to know someone in any other space. you don't get it getting to know someone in a chat room or a text message chain on a dating app. and you certainly don't get it in real life. and so there's this kind of third or track of interpersonal relations that is opened up that i found fantastic. >> yeah, and the motion of the body is such an intriguing thing. you're seeing it now, you're watching both of us up here. there was a famous, i think swedish, researcher who would put people in black morph suits, and then he would put little dots in the darkness on their bodies and then have them sit on chairs initially still, film them with a camera so what you were seeing was nothing but the tiny dots on their joints. and then he would allow the people to move. and if the person in the frame

was someone that you knew or in particular like your spouse and they later did these tests with gal vanek skin response, your body would know within a fraction of a second, you know, you can all imagine it, right? if it was someone you knew, loved, were close to, when you saw them moving just as a bunch of dots on a screen, you'd instantly know, like a cartoon, that it was them. and there's so much to be said about that although, now in second life, here's the thing. in second life, my world, before we communicated with text for the most part. and there have been documentary films done about people meeting each other and falling in love and getting married in second life. and another thing that was, i found, fascinating as you did, i got to meet some of these people like the first time they met or near thereabouts in the real world having known each other for some years or whatever in second life. and i did always find it fascinating that they seemed to know each other, be able to

complete each other's sentences by then just from the texts. so i guess this leads to the question of is there some magic elixir, is there some magic force which goes between us when we're communicating that v.r. captures, or were we making it up all along? [laughter] >> i think there's, you know, i really do think that there is something special about what happens in kind of an embodied virtual environment. and it's because i think it's a happy medium between the anonymity of the internet as we have all known it and the kind of constraints and hesitations of real life. unbridled anonymity is incredible, and that's what the internet was built on. we can choose any name we want and be anyone we want, and we can have a conversation. and because there's time to type and consider your answers, you are able to be the person that you really want to present to this world or these people.

so you're effective liqueur rating yourself. effectively curating yourself. and we all like to think we are presenting the best version of ourselves, but you have that happening and then what's also happening because everyone is where they are and you're just behind screens, disclosure comes very fast. you're fully anonymous. if you feel comfortable with these people, it's kind of easy to spill your guts. but then what happens if you meet them in real life, you realize that you wouldn't know their dots, right? you wouldn't know their black dots on a -- >> right. >> so you wouldn't know them. you don't know their mannerisms. and then in real life when you meet someone, what you get about them immediately is their rhythms. but what you don't get is their true personality, right? because that could be nerves. it could being on your best behavior. it could be social niceties.

whatever it is, it is are highly likely -- it is highly likely that a person is just not disclosing. it's very hard to be vulnerable when you meet someone in real life and give them who you really are. so at the same time, if you take the time to get to know someone in real life that often leads to, as we all know, these incredible connections. so in between with these two poles, you have this entirely other cadence of relationship. there's a degree of anonymity, right? you can choose your name, and you can make your avatar look the way you want it to, but because you're talking and because your gestures are being translated, it's almost impossible to really cover who you are. ..

you have a little bit of feeling emboldened and you have the real you. and you have the nonverbal communication, mannerisms. we put those together and what that means is, you are in this packaging the two extremes that allows for vulnerability, disclosure, intimacy. that is suitable for people who might have anxieties going into that from the beginning. and so a lot of people i have spoken to who love these multiuser experiences, a lot of them attribute it to the fact that they have difficulty finding connections in real life. it is nothing artificial about it. it is not going to a chat room and constructing a version of yourself. it is really new. just that comfort level. little bit of the rational brain that hasn't clicked open to the pr is back here saying, don't worry about it. no one will judge you because you are here and they are there. but the rest of your brain is

letting these things rise. and we can, it is fascinating that despite as you say, the body motion and the boys being conveyed, immediately to someone else is amazing how virtual environments can create this i was think of this as a bit of indirection or a bit of a safety zone or it allows you to be more, sometimes more present and more engaging when i started working on second life it was in 1999. at that time went for the first time in oh so struck by what an odd experience burning man was. he felt very, very disarmed. in willing to interact with people. i was so curious back then as to why the social contract of an environment seemed to cause me to engage with people in a different way. of course, vr and virtual world is the same thing all over

again. at least for me, it is one of the things that makes me undying only curious about the journey. let me say this. facebook, the last week has been amazing. great material for journalists worldwide. it has been incredible and of course, we've all been collectively worrying about or even condemning technology as this destroyer that would simplify or stupefy us open for that with each other. but let's say that you love vr. despite that is technology focused, for sure, is it another great destroyer like facebook? it certainly can be. that is exactly where we are. and there are, every good side has a bad side.

everything that makes immersion better in everything that makes intimacy stronger also has kind of a terrifying dark timeline. i'll give you an example. the thing we don't have yet if we were in vr together, unless we were developers and had these modules is our eyes would not be tracked. everything from a slow blink to a wake t looking over my shoulder to us at the audience, it would be simulated based on where arrowheads had turned. if i turn my head, we cannot keep eye contact because at some point my eyes would fly over in my avatars had to look straight ahead. so coming as early as later this year we will see the first headset that had the eye tracking built in. that is amazing for a lot of different reasons. it is good for fatigue. it means that you can look around and select things more easily than just moving your head around. it means it is easier to rather complicated environments because you only had to devote all of the horsepower to where

you're looking. but if your eyes are being tracked, and all of a sudden, your headset could be a collection device for attending tau -- the kind of data that they want. we look and how long. after that, when facial expressions are mapped into vr, how you responded when you saw the stuff. so, something that is incredible for nonbiblical communication. incredible for intimacy, also has this terrifying misapplication of it. similarly, talk about the personal space is very real in vr. it can also be used to traumatize someone effectively. every space we've had with toxic behavior on internet. yelling at someone in

multiplayer video games, images, sending them hateful things about themselves. someone walks up to you, fix their handout, or just consistent in your ear, it is so much more visceral than anything we've had come to us via audio before. now is the time that everyone who is building a platform like high fidelity and others is reckoning with how to restart this from happening all over again? 20, 30 years ago we prioritize growth and scale over everything. including the user experience. it allowed these legacy companies or new companies to become legacy companies that took forever and then look behind them and said oh my god! what have we done or what have we not done? just last year, instagram unveiled a new program to make comments nicely.

twitter is still grappling with the inability to stop hate speech. and hate speech directed not just spewing hate, but at a person. everyone working in vr has seen this. no one wants a sequel. when i feel positive about is that for every bad thing that can happen, people have seen it coming. forcing the potential for it to come. and so whether that is building user empowerment tools, whether that is recognizing the fact that we at some point, this was in the early days but there may need to be some regulatory approach. fishing on the internet is a terrible thing. fishing in vr, imagine this nigerian scam but someone pops up and said grandma, it's me.

let's take a grandson. just wants to make sure that he has your bank account number two are you some money. and he is embodied in you are embodied. you are in there with him. he would not break your confidence or trust but it is not him, right? fraud, abuse, harassment, psychographic data and user data being misused.anything we are grappling with right now, is amplified a million times. in something as miserable as this. but there are some positives as well. >> i mean, yes! i bring this up to say identifying them and wanting of them i think is an important thing. >> you cannot get your phone out when you have one of these wonderful things on your head. >> this is something i actually, the burning man story made me think of this. that kind of summer camp thing. the last day of summer camp. everyone was like, we are on this together and the real word doesn't intrude here.

and in vr, one of the amazing things about this at least in the early days, and hopefully much longer is the real word does not intrude, not in a avoiding way but in the beep, email, message, twitter notification. they do not come in. >> indeed to have a section in the book talking about meditation and certain apps and small teams building around mindfulness meditation, relaxation. these are based on vr. >> absolutely! the two really medical things going on when is the ability to add visualization to imitation process in a way that is lateral visualization. imagine breathing in and when you breathe out this plume of multicolored crystals. as you breathe slow, as you calm down, the color changes and you see yourself settling in. we can see her heartbeat with

these devices, for example. you can walk up to someone else and meet them for the first time and you can see her heart beating, i suppose if they wanted to let you. >> i was going to say that with sound very intrusive. ideally, but yet there is, you can in some cases, hear breathing. and you can use your own vital cues at rendered visually and whatever we would like to help yourself center. also, strip notifications away and put yourself in an environment. if anyone has ever tried to maintain a certain meditation practice, and you set yourself i'm going to sit for 20 minutes, 18 minutes later, you are like, finally, here it is. two minutes later, it is over. imagine spending 18 of those 20 minutes in the place you were trying to get to rather than two minutes.

>> this is powerful. we should take some time for questions. and we have a microphone. >> a microphone here. >> something new on here that you have not heard already, >> there filming for booktv so want to encourage you to hold the microphone up close to your mouth and ask your question. preferably in the form of a question. [laughter] i want to ask a question and take advantage of this that we will go back here but if you have a good arm, you can throw a rock and hit the stanford business school stanford medical school, sandhill road, what will be the most fields affected by virtual reality? >> all of those. for starters. i mean, every field can be. and certainly, medicine is already being affected. visualization, which we were just talking about.a few years ago there's a pediatric

surgeon in florida who needed to do a procedure on infants. cardiac procedure. and before the dr. went in, got a virtual reconstruction of the infant's heart and knew exactly where he needed to go. so we would go in and he attribute to success after the fact to the ability that he had to kind of do a dry run in vr. education, getting over the geographical constraints, bringing kids to landmarks, other countries, art resources. when we give these things to adults, or anyone using vr in the early days, actually we talked about this. you go in to a museum and you say this is amazing. i'm really close to this painting. then you look around and you are by yourself and say, okay what is next? then you're hovering over the planet saying this is amazing. what is next? that what's next goes away when

there are the people with you. we share the experience and then that is what you want to go back to. >> i think the practical answer or a tactical one relative to my own work is, video games have been the, not the poster child but the sort of opening shot of vr. frankly, overall they have not done that well. but, education and distance travel and marveling at something in a place where you can never go in the real world you could not easily get there, that in my opinion, together with other people is what we are first going to use these headsets work. if i can put you in front of the smartest you know, living physicist and let you listen to a lecture from this person and then ask questions, that is fantastic. how many people around the world would wear one of these crazy headsets plume do that? a lot! i think even more so than video games. i think we'll see social experiences, they are educational in nature being the

start. >> one thing happen the stanford campus is the virtual human interaction lab which is run by a guy who published his own book in january called experience on demand. it is fantastic. jeremy and his students and people have gone to the unaccept all done this incredible work in investigating what the phenomenon of presence means for social action. for lack of a better term. meaning that can influence on psychology and behavior of good and bad depending on anything, any variable you can change in vr. we are very suggestive creatures. if you change someone's weight in the art and make them much everything related when it come out they will move more slowly. if you make someone shorter or taller in vr, they will act a different way and it come out of the headset. who we are in vr, really matters. as strange as that is to say.

because in a lot of instances we can be anyone want to be or at least take form of anything you want to. so it jeremy in his lab and many other labs are studying is what does this mean for things like antisocial behavior? prosocial behavior? and for someone who sees the good in vr, is largely because of work like that being done to ensure that we are using this in the right way and to better. >> question?>> says this is fake reality, how can the user be aware how far it is from reality or close it is a reality? or will he lose that connection immediately? and basically believe everything. >> exposes in the connection, you will never know that you are not using virtual reality. there is a phenomenon where people who use it for a very long time and fall asleep with it on and then wake up, there

will be disorientation. but by and large, if you go to this consciously, we never lose our grip on reality. our reptilian brain believes in the virtual surrounding and that is what enables all of the stuff that we are talking about now. and that i talk about in the book. but you are also, the balance of your brain, this reptilian brain takes over as far as surroundings but the rational brain says you are still in your living room. he might be facing the wall right now. then we take the headset off you might be surprised where you are looking. but this, we are a very long way, thankfully, from being able to keep someone as far as what they see and where they think they are. i mean we are years away. what, there is a scenario which that becomes possible. and that is why i say that as

we get into perhaps, the need for regulatory approach. the need to authenticate and verify experiences just like we do with identities on social media platforms, that is the authentication burden that we are going to be grappling with when the technology gets good enough. because this all has to be done in good faith. you cannot give someone a reality because we want them to have it and they do not know that it isn't real. so i don't know what those mechanisms are. >> he is light years ahead thinking about a lot of this stuff. >> is interesting to know that when you're suggesting is that behavior can be transformational outside of or after being in virtual-reality and then coming outside. as we know it stanford, the

quarterbacks in virtual-reality to look at various defenses. and was that jeremy's lab? >> he is invited to the company. >> which is very productive for the quarterbacks. i know in medicine also, is being used for doctors during various procedures as he suggested as a cardiac surgeon. the behavior on the outside in reality is improved and enhanced. i mean that is pretty phenomenal when we think of the ramifications there. >> i think in both of those cases, and even in what we are talking about with meditation, and therapeutic applications as well, it is the benefit of feeling the benefits of thousands of hours of trial and error into do it, reset, do it, reset. that is like the focal technology mention. a quarterback in a regular

football practice, you set up i, run it. everyone has to get back into position to get the ball, you run the snap count. it is just the quarterback. no one else is involved. the dabakis runs a diminishing 30 seconds, 15 seconds. again and again and again. the efficiency of the experience is what is transformative. the same goes for the surgeon and so, there are many ways in which virtual-reality changes our behavior in real life. but the efficiency of simulation is in those cases, was it makes it such a powerful educational and training tool. >> creativity and plasticity are the two things that we see manifest really in the ability of vr to change people. we are all more creative when given the tools, when given easy access to lightweight casual shoes as we are in vr. we are all also discover we are

a lot more plastic. we can change our lives, change our bodies, change ourselves in ways that are profound and you see that when you experiment with vr. >> i am a believer and i was at a vr in medicine conference one week ago and i loved what i saw. but i'm going to change the dark side a minute. professor, the embargo from stanford talks about the fact that by the time boys are -- have typically put 10,000 hours into video gaming and additional in pornography. >> chapter 9. >> his opinion is that there may come a time when boys need affirmative action. to get into college. isn't the world going to be

much worse place from parents standpoint in terms of our kids being immersed in a virtual reality world? i'm sure that you both thought a lot about this. >> you take the sex and i'll take the nonsex. [laughter] >> you first. >> okay. he talked about two things. video games and pornography. let's talk about video gaming. here is the thing. video games simplify the world. the relationship that we have with another person. we keep track of simple scores. numbers to measure ourselves against others. video games have immersed us in that medium. that simplify medium for generations now. quite a time i guess. vr is not like that. in particular, the more rich, open and real virtual reality

environments are more challenging they become as a way of engaging with others. i believe deeply for my time with second life that in general, second life was better for young men or anyone. because when you walk into a bar, or the in the second like literally walking interspace at three different languages being spoken. it had people from 20 different countries in a room full of 50 people. if you wanted to do business with those people as you often trying to do in second life, you had to create an effective working trusting relationship with them and that was enormously challenging compared to the next door neighbor. i would say that vr in its most general sense, not in its perhaps, maybe narcotic game might sense. and i'm sure there will be examples of that. but more broadly it is day to day will present this with environments that are the opposite of video games and that they are typically very challenging and complex to

master. and i think you're pushed that way, i think that is what we all want. that is my statement on video games. first off i want to thank you for not using the term black mirror. >> not yet. >> with regards of the worry of vr pornography, there is a lot that is happening and of course, of course, is being made, right? there is an internet rule about technology. and it is rule number 34! how will this make me able to have sex for lunch people having sex? now, the evolution for the devolution of the porn industry has been predicated in large part on its value being degraded by piracy on the internet. and so, things became available for free. so people started, we still

trying to make money and things became more and more extreme as a way to stand out. so a lot of the what's been done about the degeneration boys it comes out with 10,000 hours of watching porn is watching porn that is intrinsically i would argue, different from the magazine pages kids it might have one up at looking at one decade. what's happening in vr is any desensitization that has happened with internet porn, which again is very mediated, there is a detachment. you couple the kind of ever intensifying and ever ratcheting up extremity of the acting portrayed and how they being portrayed and how people are being treated in those scenes. when you're watching through a screen, you're not part of it, you're not indicted in it were implicated in it. we put on a headset and you're

looking at adult content, you are there. what that means is you, if not a participant, at least the illusion of participation, you are in the room it changes the calculus considerably. what it means is that two things have happened. the content being made the pendulum has swung back entirely the other way. to a style of part of it almost seems quaint and in many cases feels much more that the holistic act of sex or love between two or more people. depending on what you are watching. in some cases, with vr porn, the very thing that would the theoretical underpainting of porn is it has been written about in theoretical. the active penetration is explicitly propped up because it is about eye contact and seeing somebody and it is about someone being close to you.

it is about people whispering in your ear, talking to you. it is about something happening between two people. it is not sitting back and watching things happen to people. and so, this other kind of pornography which is from the growth and experience, it has become insanely popular in the vr circles. and so, in some ways, and i spoke into performance about this and consumers about this. everyone is surprised by what happened. because you think that when you put someone in a headset, give them the ability to do or say anything that you want, the whole thing will just be reenacted all over again. >> also as he talked about, the other possibility is the person on the other end of the line is not a video at all. they are a real person. and so, the fascinating new set of gradation is being set for interaction between living people having sex or having

simulated sex in vr. and that will create a whole, i think wonderful set of kind of explorations about who people are and where they want to be with and what constitutes adultery or whatever. it will be fascinating. >> i nothing every kitchen at 10,000 hours of porn under the golf before they go to college. what i am saying is -- that often falls to the parent. but i would say that what i am seeing in the industry that is making money for technology for the first time in a very long time is giving people what vr enables. that is intimacy rather than extremity. that to me is a heartening thing. >> i think we are ready in the center for the next question. >> i have been reading a number of articles and research around just how addictive mobile phones are and the apps on

mobile phones. i think is eluded to some of the early that will be really interested to hear i think the addictive tendencies are either different or the same with vr and how they should be approached or maybe even regulated. >> this is sticky for a lot of different reasons. literally dependent how you treat them thumbs are sticky. but phones are because the apps when using them. they are creators do not necessarily want you using them before that long if it leads to discomfort. and right now, in these early days, they are something that you can use for an hour, maybe a couple of hours. hard-core people for two or three hours. the vast majority people will not use it that long. we are talking about much more of a experience. by virtue, through the technology right now you're not seeing those by the creator of the experiences.

it certainly is something we're going to need to contend with. and just like the new technology, the idea that they are spending too much time with friends or being distracted. right now the amazing thing is there is nothing intruding on this which makes the interactions and experiences so meaningful. and so, it will be a thing. and ethically, it is not a thing. >> i think it is you know the choice to use these rather addictive and happily know well studied so perhaps more sobering properties of particularly applications and notifications on phones.is quite different than they are, again. >> i want to thank peter and philip for being here. we are over time and i want to make sure that they get a chance to sign some books and talk to you further but peter is going to be signing.

you can come up and ask him a question. if you have not bought a book i encourage you to pick up a copy. a lot of what they talked about and more is covered in here. philip will stick around and answer questions if you have for him as well. this is such an important topic. i can't think these guys enough for the seriousness they are brought to this claim. let's give them a round of applause. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> booktv has recently covered several books on technology. which include talks before world chess champion garry -- on artificial intelligence for

software engineer ellen allman on her twenty-year career. and tech entrepreneur brian dear on the precursor to today's online communities. the plato system. this is a topic that interests you then visit booktv.org. tech technology both in the search bar. several programs will appear and can be watched in their entirety online. >> welcome to new york law school. it is good to see everyone here tonight. i think it will be a special evening. thank you for joining us. i am the vice president for institutional advancement and new york law school. i am one of many