>> "wired" magazine senior editor peter rubin is author of the book "future presence" about virtual reality, its affect on entertainment and human relationships. he talked about the future of this technology at a bookstore in menlo park, california. this is an hour.

>> aha.how about now? is that better? level, speed. you know, as the world becomes virtual, which is a big subject of peter's book. it's so interesting that were starting to do things like this. a bit in virtual reality and it's always so interesting to compare what happens in the real world to what's increasingly having happening in the virtual world. >> just last week, i did a reading and q and day in virtual reality in a multiuser environment called rec room. i was holding a microphone, if i wasn't holding the microphone, people wouldn't have been able to hear my voice coming out of the speakers ever built into this virtual environment.

what i was holding in real life was just a controller, a hand controller i would use in any other way. but by pressing a button, i was gripping the object in front of me. as i was able to pick it up, and it was the microphone and then activated the pa system that had been coded into this room. for me, it was like him sitting here, holding my hand to my face. people were sitting there, each one of you would have been sitting or standing at home wherever you were with a headset on. you would have been looking at a stage with something that's very cartoonish but still looks a little like me was up there with a microphone talking. the question and answers were just like question and answers, it was really remarkable. how many of you guys have tried a the or headset yet? just about everybody. how many have done one pc ones

like the oculus rift or the htc vibe? interesting. we are in the motherland. so, you've probably got an idea. the final question is, maybe more for me or both of us, how many of you have done that in a social setting? that is, using one of those devices speaking to another human being in virtual world? that's cool. >> the numbers keep going down. i'm glad to see some. >> peters book dwells on the question, when you say what's going to happen to us what the world is going to be like. more as it relates to the experience of presidents, "future presence". present is used not only as this expression for making you feel present in another space,

another world by having your eyes and ears i get fooled, and a good way into believing your there. there's also this idea of presence which very much relates to my own work about making us feel like were actually together in the space. that's a big piece of this. >> a shortened term or a shortened version of telepresence which is something that's a bit more widely known and larger technological circles. anything from working remotely is telepresence. but it emerged more recently and has been studying studied academically for 25 years or more but it really began to become a fixed, more explicitly to vr with the rebirth of the technology. there were other use words used

in the 90s when this first got our attention from a consumer perspective. people talk about the conversion moment, that being the thing where your brain clicked into believing the virtual world. the presence came back into vogue and was always something beautiful about that phrase to me. because it wasn't about tricking you. it's more just about you all in one place and now you're in another place.>> as you were saying, when i was a kid i actually got the presence journal. when did it start? >> 92. >> so in 92, you had these crazy people writing a journal about this word called presence. can you believe that? what would you say is different now? everybody says as a starting point, what is different now about this vr thing since it's something crazy people in silicon valley have been doing for like 30 years now.

>> longer. when you go back to the military and academic labs. the late 60s, the first time someone tried to put a headmounted display front of someone's face. a lot of credence is given the advent of the smart phone because all of a sudden, you had all of these manufacturers had a reason to make displays that were high-quality but still small and the ongoing miniaturization of hardware. on the technical side, all of a sudden, all of the things that weren't fast enough or too big to do in the 90s became not just cheaper and assessable, but you could pack them into a small package. and so, there were labs around the 2000 and early 2010s that were finding these open source solutions toputting these things together . and then what changed

everything is latching onto the world of video games. and that got people'sattention . in 2012, is the first time anyone heard the term oculus rift. which at the time was a ski mask strap attached with the tape and sheet magnifying lenses. it didn't start there but that certainly made a lot of people's ears perk up. >> indeed, one of the gods of video gaming from my perspective as a developer, a guy named john carmack. famously, the guy who worked on theoculus rift . john carmack wrote something or soft palmers gadget or heard about it and said, it's. [pretty good. palmer but the whole thing, the only version of his duct tape masterpiece in a box and send it in the mail to john because he was so amazed that the god of gaming was blessing him with

being interested in this thing. >> john carmack famously was one of the people responsible for games like doom. things that revolutionized the videogame world because it provided a three-dimensional experience. he takes this headset in 2012 to the same game show he's been going to for years and years and years and showed a few people. word got out quickly. i was able to see it that year but the next year when i went back, there was a company that had formed around the idea. the oculist, and that's when i sought. >> how many people were - - when you got the demo? >> it was just me and at the time, the ceo. in the company, there were probably 15 people. maybe fewer.>> that's amazing. >> the first 5-6 of them, one has tragically passed away since then.

but the first 5-6 or seven of them were kind of responsible, in that single year, bringing this thing out to a generation of kick starter early adopters. >> my own work, having been in virtual worlds all my life. i was not doing, i was now working on virtual-reality or virtual worlds at that time. but, the chip - - the chips in our phones now came out and were capable of tracking the motions of our heads. i got one of these chips and did up to a civil scope the ã i'm an electronics guy. i had a board with a chip on and i turned in my fingers. watching the trace go up and down. i could tell it was so accurate, so fast and so accurate. i was just like, oh my god this

is what all of us vr nuts i wanted for so long. and i called them ãand several shutting this company down our going back into vr. that was 2012 around the same time. >> that's when it all came together. someone like me when 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 demonic. the movies of my teenager years, i was captivated not just by how ridiculously kind of - - they seem to was now but those early headsets and suits. how cool they look from the outside but then the renditions of what was happening inside the headset, i was completely swept away. despite that, despite the fact

that in the 90s, there were some rudimentary experiences people could have. i never, ever, tried it. my eyes didn't go into a headset until 2013. so i felt like that 15-16-year-old me, all of a sudden was like overnight, this feels real. i went back to work and i was like, you are probably not going to believe me because we've heard the story before. but, vr is actually coming. and they're like yeah right, this is wired. i was like no, i don't know, i think this is it. at the time, that was based on video games but 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're in there with someone else, the emotional tenor of an experience changed irrevocably. not only was what you were doing vivid, just like anything else was vivid and immersive based on vr technology. but by virtue, of sharing that, the two of you might not experience the same thing but you both left with this incredible lasting memory of having done it. with another person. and so, anything you do in vr as a lot of you 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 doing the things were doing in there. it turns out your brain actually accesses the memories the same way it accesses

real-life memories. it takes longer to access memories of something you done in vr that something is seen in the photograph because it's. in a different place and it's deeper. and so, leave this incredible memory of an experience and it's a shared experience. so even games companies at this point have recognized that. and it's very rare to find. even just a game that is just you by yourself. >> let's unpack that. you've written about a bunch of things here. i made notes in the book myself as i read. >> i can vouch, i see a lot of underlined. i see an angry face, what is that about? [laughter] >> don't think there's an angry face. you write about memory. i think that something i've

thought a lot about too. this idea that we store our memories best when the presented spatially. >> absolutely. >> that's one of the things that's super fascinating about vr. our ability to recollect things is markedly improved by remembering them in the context of a familiar place. what's more familiar and will become even more familiar than sort of putting this headset on and being in the space. we will lay on our screens around us, the our email on the walls. and just doing that is going to improve our memory of things. that's fascinating facts certainly. if anyone's ever read or heard from a person who is actually a competitive memory champion. the trick to memorizing a deck of cards is every card, you kind of unpacked and give it a different image.

rather than trying to remember the order and what those cards were, you are remembering a series of events which is easier for people to do . that becomes - - and when you add to that this thing called embodiment. that is what i was just describing in the arm. a lot of us in a lightweight headset, the things driven by phones right now and are standalone devices very soon. if you're in a 360 degree video, you are essentially a disembodied camera. if you look down, you don't see anything. but in the social world like the one you built, and in games and narrative experiences, if you look down and see a body, just like i did you have your hands and you can your hands. this is not an immediate form

of communication anymore. you're in there and you are doing the things. and so we've always use these metaphors of control while interacting with digital world's. buttons and thumb sticks, those are gone so reaching out and grabbing things. handing things and contacting other people.by virtue of that embodiment, the memory becomes that much stronger. and then a lot of other things i'm sure we'll get into but the tricks you can play on the psyche with that our amazing flexwhat about the . >> what about the space between us that you've written so much about. when we communicate in vr, member the gentleman i saw last night. we were catching up and he actually told me that the first dr device was not the sort of - - but earlier in the 50s, there

was a vr thing for cats. >> i'm sorry, what? >> cats. it was like a headset that was being used to study cats by presenting them with simple lines and images. this is like in the 50s. >> that is maybe the most of it ãi've ever heard in my life. >> right. [chuckle] - - used to debate how many movements per second are generating between us right now. what you think is working and not working in terms of face-to-face communication in summary in vr? >> i would say this to start out with. not only white lack the technical knowledge to talk about it in bits but, i think even if i did, i would have skirted a wide berth around that i'm a culture writer.

i'm not a tech writer so when i became fascinated by vr, what became fascinating about it was a holistic experience i know what goes into it , like you said you're an engineer and physics in these other things. so you have made and incredible career out of aunderstanding th right and left brain parts of this. when i think about what we're doing now, if we are approximating this in virtual reality, the only things we would really have in their being tracked would be our heads and hands. so you would be doing this and what i would see as you would have your hand to your chin and would be nodding your head so that would come through. so your facial expression for the most part would be approximated. it would be neutral or based on the sound of your voice it may be given some sort of emotion. our bodies would be extrapolated. based on what your hands were

and your body. in some platforms, say, the legs, that's too much. you would have a torso and hands. so right now, where dealing with what we can muster the ability to render. what's remarkable is how many gaps your brain fills in. as a quick example of that, there are early orientation demos that headset manufacturers have made. one of those you are standing in front of a mirror, and what you are, changes. be it a red balloon or a skeleton but no matter what it is, if you are turning your head and tilting it, your reflection is doing exactly that. you will see yourself in a school, you see yourself in kind of a metal son icon.

so it doesn't take much for me to see you in this assemblage. because your voice is coming through and your mannerisms are coming through. what you do with your hands when your listening and the way you nod, if i only knew in vr and we were having this conversation. and we sat somewhere and we were talking, i'd be like, of course. this feels natural. i feel like we've spent time together before because the nonverbal stuff comes through. >> you should relate the story of the people you got a chance to meet after they had met and perhaps dated when first starting to know each other in rec room packs that's a great idea. i will do that. so, not the most ambitious multiuser out there but a popular one. it's called rec room.

when i first started connecting with people in there as a journalist. not just a someone was terrible at playing paintball in there. i met someone that said you know what, i couple people in my group, one will visit the other. i said, as a reporter, that's exactly the kind of thing i like to hear. so i spent time with these two people in vr. the thing that struck me about them then was the comfort they had with one another. because these are embodied avatars. we're just hanging out in a neutral environment. it's kind of like the game room and people sit around and play cards or just sit around. there's a stage and you can play charades. there are all these tools you can use in there. i was talking to a guy on his name was ben. while i was talking to him, his

friend, a woman named priscilla. she was taking posted notes, writing on the notes with the pen in vr and sticking it to his avatar one at a time. as time went on, she had made a bikini out of these post-it notes and stuck it on this guy's chest. and it wasn't just the shape of the post-it notes, what she had drawn on them was effectively a bikini top. this very casual intimacy it was already part of their relationship, struck me immediately. fast forward a few weeks later, ben had driven from his home in cincinnati to alabama to visit priscilla. and they spent a few days together. by the time i connected with them on the skype video call. two things about that that are still with me. one is when you do a skype video call or face time with someone, you're never looking

at each other. if they're trying to look at you, they're looking at a camera lens. and if there looking at what they see of you, then your eyes always doing this. this no actual connection. something is lost in that mediation. not only was that happened between me on one end and ben and priscilla on the other, but they were sitting according to the decorum of the real world and people who haven't spent much physical time together. so there was a tiny bit of awkwardness that i could see. 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 vr. since then, i've learned partially it was because they weren't necessarily the match they thought they might be. in fact, priscilla ended up marrying someone else she met in that world that that's covered in a chapter in the book but we did an excerpt or an adaptation of the chapter in the april issue of wired and we made it much more about the wedding that then happened. it's kind of the fast forward to this other relationship. if you have read that piece in the magazine, then the book chapter is a prequel. if you have not read the magazine piece and read the book, then you get a nice - - at the end. but, it really is the thing that holds true still from the very first time i saw this arise. is that 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. you certainly don't get into life. so there's this kind of third track of interpersonal relations that has opened up that i found fascinating facts the. >> there have been studies done that i think was a famous swedish researcher that would put people in black suits and he would put little dots in the darkness on their bodies and have them sit in chairs, initially still.film them with the camera so what you were seeing when you watch the camera playback was nothing but the tiny dots on their joints. then he would allow people to move. if the person in the frame was someone you knew in particular like your spouse, and they

later did these tests with skin response. your body would know within a fraction of a second the ãyou would imagine if it was someone you knew or loved over close to, when you saw the moving, just as a bunch of dots on the screen, you'd instantly know that it was them. there's so much to be said about that. 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, falling in love and getting married in second life. another thing i found fascinating as you did, i got to meet some of these people like the first time they met. when you are thereabouts in the real world having known each other for some years in second life. i did always find it fascinating that they seemed to know each other, be able to complete each other sentences.

i guess this leads to the question is is there some magic elixir or for speckles between us were communicating that vr captures or were we making it up all along? >> i really do think there's something special about what happens in an embodied virtual environment. it's because i think it's a happy medium between the anonymity of the internet as we have known it in the constraints and hesitations of her lifereal life. unbridled anonymity, we can 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 you really want to present to this world for these people. so you're effectively curating

yourself. 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, closer comes very fast. if you feel comfortable with these people, it's easy to spill your guts. but then you happen to meet them in real life and you realize, you wouldn't know you dots. you wouldn't know their mannerisms. in real life when you meet someone, what you get about them immediately is the rhythms. but what you don't get is there true personality. right? that could be nerves. it could be being on your best behavior. whenever it is. it's highly likely a person is just not disclosing.

it's hard to be vulnerable in real life and give them we 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 know, these incredible connections. so in between these two polls, that is entirely other cadence of relationship. there's a degree of anonymity. you can choose a name and makes your avatar the way you want it to. but because you're talking, and your gestures are being translated, it's almost impossible to really cover for you are. you can think you're presenting the best self but it's you. your essence will come out because you having real-time interactions with these people. but because of that degree of anonymity you have, you might feel more confident than you would in the real world. so you have a little bit of feeling emboldened and you have

the real you. and you have the nonverbal communications and the mannerisms. put that together and what that means is, you are blending this past between those two extremes that allows for vulnerability and disclosure and intimacy. that's suitable for people who might have anxiety going into that from the beginning. a lot of people that i've spoken to love these multiuser vr experiences, i love them attributed to the fact that they have difficulty finding these connections in real life. there's nothing artificial about it but it's not like going into a chat room and constructing a version of yourself. it's really you. but justthat comfort level . that little part of your brain that hasn't fully clicked over to vr is saying, don't worry about it. but the rest of your brain is letting these things arise.

>> it's fascinating that despite the body and the emotion being conveyed immediately to someone else. it's amazing how virtual environments can create, i always think of a bit of an interaction, a safety zone. that allows you to be more present and more engaging. when i started working on second life, it was in 1999. at that time, i went to - - at the same time that i was so struck by what an odd burning man experience was. and that he felt very disarmed and willing to interact with people. i was so curious back then asked why the social contract of an environment seemed to cause me to engage with people in a different way. of course vr and virtual worlds is the same thing over again. for me, it's one of the things that makes me undying way curious and optimistic about

continuing the journey. something next to talk about, let me say this. facebook, the last week has been amazing. great material for journalists worldwide. it's been incredible and we've all been collectively worrying about even condemning technology as this destroyer that would simplify or stupefy us or bring us further away from each other. but what say you of vr? despite the fact is very technology focused for sure, is it another great destroyer like facebook? >> it certainly can be. that's exactly where we are. every good sign has a bad sign. everything that makes immersion better and everything that makes intimacy stronger also

has a terrifying dark timeline. i will give you an example. the thing we don't have yet if you and i were in the art together unless we were developers and had these add-on modules in our headsets.is our eyes would be tracked. for everything from a slow blank to a wink to you looking over my shoulder be that would be simulated based on where our heads have turned. but if i turn my head, we can keep eye contact because at some point my eyes would slide over in my avatar's head to look straight ahead. coming as early as this year they will have headsets that have high tracking built in. that's amazing for a lot of reasons. it's good for fatigue. you can look around and selecting is more easily. it means it's easier to render complicated environments because you only have to devote the computing horsepower to where exactly you are looking. but, if your eyes are being tracked, then all of a sudden your headset could be a

collection device for the kind of data that every advertiser have waited decades to be able to get. where you look, how long you look at it and after that, when facial expressions are mapped into the are based on muscular contraction or sensors or whatever. how you responded when you saw this stuff. something that is incredible for nonverbal communication. something that's incredible for intimacy, also has a terrifying misapplication of it. similarly, this - - point of physical proximity. personal space is very real and vr. it can also be used to traumatize someone effectively. so every experience we've had with toxic behavior on the internet. yelling at someone in videogame. sending them images. sending them hateful things

about themselves. someone walks up to you, sticks their hands out or just says something in your ear. it's a much more visceral than anything we've had come to us via screen or even audio before. so now is the time that everyone who was building a platform like high fidelity, like rec room, is reckoning with how do we stop the - - of the internet from happening all over again. 20-30 years ago, we prioritized growth and scale over everything including the user experience. that allowed these legacy companies were new companies that took forever and then looked behind them and the like, oh my god. what have you done or what have we not done? just last year is to be unveiled a new program to make the comments nicer. twitter is still grappling with the inability to stop hate speech.

and hate speech directed, not just viewing hate but at a person. everyone is working in the r has seen this movie before. no one wants the sequel. what i feel positive about is that for every bad thing that can happen, people have seen it coming. seen the potential for it to come. whether that's recognizing the fact that we at some point, there may need to be regulatory approach. cat fishing on the internet is a terrible thing. cat fishing in the , imagine the nigerian scam. someone pops up and says hey grandma, it's mean. just wants to make sure he is your bank account to send you

some money. and he's embodied and you are in there with them. you wouldn't break your confidence or your trust. so fraud period of use. harassment. psychographic data. anything that we are grappling with right now is amplified 1 million times in something as visceral virtual-reality. >> but there are positives as well. >> yes. i bring them up to say learning of them is an important thing. >> you can't get your phone out when you happen these wonderful things on your head. the burning man story made me think of this too. that kind of summer camp thing. we're all in this together and the real world doesn't intrude here. in thevr, the real world doesn'

intrude and not and i'm avoiding it kind of way. they don't come in. >> and you have a section in the book talking about medication and some of the meditation apps. there are many meditation apps and small teams building things around mindfulness, meditation, relaxation that are based on v . >> the two magical things, one is the ability to have visualization through a meditation practice. imagine breathing in and when you breathe out, a plume of multicolored crystals. as your breathing flows and as yukon, the color changes and you see yourself settling in. we can see your heartbeat with these devices for example. >> you could walk up to someone else and meet them for the first time and see their heart beating. if they wanted to let you.

>> that sounds very intrusive. there is, you can in some cases here breathing. so there's a chance not just for biometric monitoring but biometric feedback. so you can use your own vital cues rendered visually in whatever way you like to help yourself center. and also you strip the notifications away and you put yourself in an environment. if anyone has tried to maintain a meditation practice and you say i'm going to sit for 20 minutes. 18 minutes later, like finally here it is. two minutes later, it's over. imagine spending 18 of those 20 minutes and the place you are trying to get to rather than the two. >> we should take time for questions i think. >> and we have a microphone.

>> there's something new to hit on as if you haven't heard already. >> want to encourage you to hold the mic up close to your mouth and ask your question. preferably in the form of the question. [laughter] wanted to ask the question and take advantage and then we will go back here. if you've got a good arm, you can throw a rock and hit the stanford medical school, what fields are going to be the most affected by virtual-reality? >> all of those. for starters. every field can be affected. certainly medicine is already being affected. visualization which we were just talking about, a few years ago there was a pediatric surgeon in florida who needed to do a procedure on an infant. a cardiac procedure. before the doctor went in, got

a virtual reconstruction of th infant's heart. new exactly where he needed to go . so he attributed his success after the fact to the ability he had to do a dry run in vr. education. getting over geographical constraints. bringing kids to other landmarks, other countries. art resources. when we give these things to adults or anyone using vr in the early days. when i talked about this. you go in to a museum and you say, this is amazing. i'm really close to his painting. then you look around and you'll be by yourself and say, what's next. then your hovering and the like, this is amazing. what's next? that what's next goes away when there are other people in there with you. you share the experience and that's what you want to go back

to. >> i think the practical or tactical answer relative to my own work, as peter said, videogames have been the poster child. they been out of the opening shot of vr. frankly, overall, they haven't done that well. but, education and distance travel and marveling at something in a place where you could never go in the real world or you couldn't easily get there. that in my opinion, together with other people is what where first going to use these headsets for. if i could put you in front of the smartest living physicists and that you listen to a lecture and then ask questions, that's fantastic. how many people around the world would don one of these crazy headsets to do that? a lot. i think more so than video games. i think we will see social experiences that are educational in nature being the startup point.>> one thing that's happening on stanford campus, the virtual human interaction lab run by a guy

named jeremy - - he published his own book called experience on demand and it's fantastic. jeremy and his students have all done this and credible work investigating what the phenomenon of presence means for social action. for lack of a better term. meaning, you can influence someone's psychology and behavior in good and bad ways depending on any variable you can change in vr. we are very suggestible creatures. if you change someone's weight, when they come out of vr, they will move more slowly. if you make someone shorter or taller, they were at the different way when they come out on the headset. we are in vr really matters. as strange as that is to say because in a lot of instances, we can be anyone we want to be or take the form of anything we want to.

so jeremy and other labs are studying what does this mean for things like antisocial behavior. prosocial behavior. for someone who sees the good in vr, it's largely because of work like that that's being done to ensure were using this in theright way and to a enable our better angels. >> since vr is basically a fake reality, how can the user be aware of how far it is or how close it is to reality? or will he lose that connection immediately and basically believe everything? >> you're never going to know you're not using virtual reality. there is a phenomenon where people who use it for a long time and fall asleep with it on and wake up, there's a little disorientation that happens. but by and large you go into

this consciously. we never lose our grip on reality. we are reptilian brain believes in the virtual surrounding and that's what enables all of the stuff for talking about now and that i talk about in thebook. but you are also , the balance of your brain. if the reptilian brain takes over as far as believing your surroundings but the rational brain is likeyou are still in y living will. room. we are a very long way, thankfully, from being able to dupe someone as far as what they see and where they think they are. we are years away. there is a scenario in which that becomes possible. that's why i say, that's where

you 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's the authentication burden that we will be grappling with when the technology gets good enough. this all has tobe done in good faith . you can't give someone a reality because you want them to have it and they don't know it's not real. so i don't know what those mechanisms are. philip knight. he's light years ahead thinking about a lot of this stuff. >> it's interesting to know that what you are suggesting is that behavior can be transformed, transformational, outside after being in virtual-reality and then coming outside. at stanford, the quarterbacks did virtual-reality to look at various defenses.

was that jeremy's lab? which was very productive for the quarterbacks. i know in medicine too, it's being used for doctors doing various procedures as you suggested this cardiac surgeon. the behavior on theoutside with reality is improved and enhanced . that's pretty phenomenal when we think of the ramifications there was i thinking that. >> i think in both of those cases and even what we were talking about meditation. it's the benefit of distilling the benefits of thousands of hours of trial and error into, do it, reset. that's what's amazing about the football training technology. a quarterback in a regular football practice. you set up a play, you run it. you get back into position, you from the snap count.

it's just a quarterback.no one else is involved. quarterback just wants the simulation. again and again. the efficiency of the experience is what's transformative. 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 what makes it such a powerful educational and training tool. >> creativity and plasticity are the two things we see manifest in the ability of vr to change people. we are all more creative when given the tools. when given easy access to lightweight casual tools as we are in vr. we are all also discovered we are a lot more plastic. we can change our lives, change our bodies and ourselves in ways that are profound to see that when you experiment with

vr. >> i'm a believer. i was at a vr medicine conference and loved what i saw. but i will turn to the dark side for a minute. professor - - from stanford talks about the fact that boys, by the time there undergrads have typically put in 10,000 hours into video gaming and an additional 10,000 hours into pornography. >> chapter 9. >> his opinion that there may come a time when boys need affirmative action to get into college. isn't the world going to be much worse from apparent standpoint in terms of our kids

being immersed in virtual-reality world? i'm sure you both thought a lot about it. >> you take the sex one and i will take the not sex one. [laughter] >> you first. >> okay. he talked about things, video gaming and pornography. video games simplify the world. the relationship we have with another person is to shoot them. we keep track of simple scores and numbers to measure ourselves against others. videogames have immersed us in that medium. that simplify medium for generations now. vr is not like that. in particular, the more rich, open and deal virtual-reality environments are the 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 walked into a bar so to speak or literally. in second life, you are walking into a space that had three different languages spoken. it had people from 20 different countries and a total of 50 people. if you wanted to do business with those people which are often trying to do, you had to create an effective working relationship. and that was challenging computer next door neighbor. i would say that vr in its most general sense. not in its narcotic name like sense and i'm sure there will be examples of that. but more broadly, it's more day-to-day. he presents us with environments that are the opposite of videogames in that they are typically very challenging and complex to master. i think when you pushed that

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

became more extreme as a way to stand out. so a lot of the handwringing being done about this generation of boys that comes out with 10,000 hours of watching pornography is watching pornography that is intrinsically, i would argue, different from the magazine pages that kids might have grown up looking at in one decade or pictures online. what's happening in vr is that any desensitization that's happened with internet pornography again is mediated. there's a detachment. so you couple the kind of ever intensifying in the ever ratcheting up extremity of the acting portrayed and how they're being portrayed and how people are being treated. in those scenes. when you're watching through a screen, you are not partnering. you are not implicated in it. when you put on a headset and are looking at adult contact, you are there. but that means is if not a

participant, the illusion of participation. you are in the room and that changes the calculus considerably. what that means is that two things have happened. the content being made, the pendulum has one back entirely the other way to a style of pornography that almost seems quaint. in many cases, feels much more like holistic act of sex for love between two or more peopl , depending on what you're watching. in some cases with vr pornography, the very thing that was the theoretical underpinning as it's been written about. the act of penetration is cropped out because it's about eye contact and send somebody and someone being close to you. it's about people whispering in your ear talking to you.

it's not something happening between two people. it's not sitting back and watching things happen to people. and so this other kind of pornography has become insanely popular in vr circles. in some ways and i've spoken to performers about this and consumers about this. everyone is surprised by what happened. because you think when you give someone a headset, give them the ability to do or see anything they want. the whole thing would just be reenacted all over. >> also have what you talked about with - - the other possibility is the person on the other line is - - a fascinating new set of - - is being created for interaction between living people having sex or simulated sex in vr. that will create a whole wonderful set of explorations

about people are and where they want to be with and what constitutes adultery or whatever. >> i'm not saying that every kid should have 10,000 hours of pornography under their belt before they go to college. what i am saying is that often falls to the parent. but i would say what i am saying in the industry that is making money from a technology for the first time in a very long time is giving people what vr enables. that is intimacy rather than extremity and that is for me, a heartening thing. >> next question. >> i've been reading a number of audibles of how addictive mobile phones are and the apps. i think he sort of eluded to some of that earlier but i'd be interested to hear how you think the addictive tendencies

are either different or the same with vr and how they should be approached or maybe even regulated? >> phones are sticky for a lot of different reasons. phones are literally sticky depending on how you treat them. but the experience is tricky because apps when using them. vr creators don't necessarily want you using them for that long if it leads to discomfort. and right now, in these early days, vr is something you can use for an hour. maybe couple hours. hard-core people would use for 3-4 hours.that majority of people won't use that long. for talking about for large degree, a much - - experience. just by virtue of the constraints of the technology right now, you're not seeing those instincts being indulged by the creators of those experiences. it's something we will need to contend with. just like the handwringing over

any new technology.the idea were spending too much time or our brains are being distracted. right now, there's nothing intruding on this which is what makes these interactions and experiences so meaningful. it will be a thing but right now, thankfully it's not. >> it's different. the choice to use these rather addictive and well studied, perhaps over and properties of particularly applications and notifications on phones is quite different than vr. interesting. >> i want to thank both peter and philip for being here. we're over time and i want to make sure they get a chance to sign some books and talk to you further.peter is going to be signing. you can ask a question. even if you haven't bought a book but 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 as well. it's a serious topic and an important topic. i can't thank these guys enough for the seriousness they brought to it tonight. can we give them a round of applause? [applause] [inaudible conversations] ...

>> my interest and my service even my members resistance to me or their acceptance of me. i was on the drafting committee because it made a contribution. also they accept me as an

equal. and allowed me to know to negotiate with the best of them. >> the last panel to finish out the day we are talking about the age of artificial intelligence. at georgetown university a great pleasure to have with us today