“Experience on Demand”: The Great Promise—and Pitfalls—of VR

Jeremy Bailenson is a true virtual reality (VR) pioneer. HisVirtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL),at Stanford University, is a leader in research on how virtual reality affectspeople, what it can do, what the limitations are—and how it can (or should) beused in eLearning. He’s also thought and written extensively about ethicalissues that arise in the use of VR. Bailenson’s new book, Experience onDemand, as well as research published by Bailenson and others in the VHIL,points to areas where L&D professionals are right to see VR as agame-changer—and areas where caution must be exercised.

Simulators excel for skills drills

Immersive environments trick the brain. When a learner isimmersed in a digital environment—even if the environment is obviously acomputer-generated environment—the brain believes it is real. Bailensondescribes the reactions of participations in demo VR experiences, from the realfear—complete with measurable physiological responses they experience whenwalking a virtual plank—to the incidents where participants fleeing from flyingitems in a virtual earthquake nearly ran into a real wall.

That realism is why simulation-basedlearning works. Bailenson has a formula: Use VR for things that areimpossible, dangerous, or prohibitively expensive to do in real life. Why doesthe military put pilots through hours and hours of flight simulator training?Because mistakes in the simulator are free; errors that endanger real pilottrainees and real planes are not.

That holds true for a myriad of environments and tasks whereVR training can dramatically improve the skills of learners—and make trainingavailable to many, many more learners. Once a training module is created, itcan easily be replicated and made available. The ramifications of this fortraining surgeons around the world, for example, or providing employees of vastmultinational corporations with realistic, effective training in procedures andprocesses, are almost unlimited. The primary obstacles are the cost andavailability of headsets and suitable spaces for training.

While the cost of headsets has come down—and quality hasimproved—providing VR training to large numbers of learners is still quitecostly, which is why it has primarily been adopted by large, wealthyorganizations—the NFL, for example, and Walmart.

STRIVR, a project that grewout of the VHIL, was quickly adopted by NFL and college football teams. STRIVRhas since expanded its offerings to other sports—and beyond sports. Early usersquickly realized that the immersive practice facilitated mastery of severalskills:

• Muscle memory—players could practice moves andplays over and over, developing that automatic muscle memory that enablesexperienced bike riders or drivers to engage in those tasks without having tothink about each physical step.
• Skilled, almost automatic execution of thephysical task frees up attention for other key details. Seeing a bigger-pictureview allows players to notice other players’ movements,expressions, and gestures that might indicate what they’ll do next; practicingthese skills made players better at noticing these essential “tells” in realgame play, improving their overall performance. Creating accurate mentalrepresentations also allows players to develop the expertise to know whatmovements and activities they can safely not pay attention to.

Walmart signed on with STRIVR to create employee training,attracted by the possibility of having all trainees experience the sametraining in the same virtual scenario on demand. The first module, according toBailenson’s book, was a virtual supermarket. Deli counter managers can practicehandling multiple customers at once, including challenging customers. Floormanagers can realistically experience the multitasking the job demands—withoutangering actual customers or making costly errors. While developing the modulesrequires a significant investment of time and resources, Walmart could then usethese modules across all 200 of their training facilities. For Walmart, thistraining is less costly than setting up actual stores to train employees, andthe training is consistent for all employees in all sites.

Heightened emotional impact

Immersive experiences pack more of an emotional punch thanvisualizations or more passive learning media, such as video or text. While in somesorts of eLearning, that could be an advantage, Bailenson cautions that, forother types of immersive experiences it is a drawback or, at minimum, somethingthat designers need to consider carefully.

An example he provides is weapons training. While trainingsoldiers to use weapons and to be aware of the risks of a realistic environmentis appealing for many reasons, other applications of realistic and violentscenarios likely have more risk than benefit. Bailenson raises concerns about theemotional impact on learners who feel as if they have personally carried outthe action. Describing the feeling of playing a “surgery simulator” whichallows players to “torture” a virtual alien, he wrote, “I simply felt bad. Ihad used my hands to do violence. The experience of performing surgery on alifelike entity stayed with me—I actually felt remorse hours after theexperience.”

In addition to the emotional impact of committing virtualviolence, Bailenson worries about the behavior modeling aspect. His work withSTRIVR and other simulators leaves him “little doubt that VR can effectivelyteach the skills required to succeed at violence (emphasis in theoriginal).” Violent VR simulations enable players to train for committingactual violence. “None of this should come as a shock,” Bailenson wrote. “Theseeffects are why the military has flight simulators and uses VR to trainsoldiers for combat. It works.”

Everything in moderation

Like any tool, VR and its characteristics can be used inpositive or negative ways, and the technology can be used—or overused—inharmful ways. In Experience on Demand, Bailenson raises several areas ofconcern, including the potential for overuse of VR and the use of VR to escapeor avoid social contact.

The immersiveness and increasing realism of virtualenvironments heightens their appeal and therefore increases the likelihood thatpeople will want to spend time there. Extended time spent in virtual worldscould impact social norms and in-person interactions in ways yet to be seen.One feature of time spent in virtual worlds, though, is already evident on alesser scale: distraction and lack of awareness of the physical world.Distracted walking and driving are real hazards in the smartphone age.Participants in VR can (and do) run into physical walls, and bump into or evenhit nearby people. “In spite of what proponents of multitasking say, attentionis zero-sum,” Bailenson wrote. “We only have so much of it to go around. And VRdemands one’s total attention.” He has personally had to intervene to stopparticipants from unwittingly hurting themselves or others in the lab.

The increasingly engaging nature and draw of VR highlightsan additional area of concern: potential for overuse. One hazard of spendingtoo long in VR is simulationsickness, though as technology improves, fewer people experience this phenomenon.Eyestrain remains a hazard, though, and Bailenson offers a brief explanation ofthe problem: When we’re not using a headset, each of our eyes adjustsindividually to accommodate changes in distance when we focus on differentobjects or we (or the object) move. In a headset, the focus—sharpness—of ascene doesn’t change, no matter how the wearer moves her head or which elementshe focuses on.

Physical effects aside, spending large amounts of time in VRcan lead to confusion about what is part of the real world and what is part ofthe virtual world. This concern is chiefly relevant in VRuse among children, especially young children who, Bailenson points out, arenot yet developmentally able to reliably distinguish reality from fantasy andwho are “notoriously susceptible to acquiring false memories.” He also callsattention to the “astonishing” lack of significant research on the effects ofVR on children, given that emerging VR content will “include many games,educational programs, and VR experiences that will be aimed at children.”

The good, the bad …

Bailenson examines VR with a clear-eyed understanding ofboth its potential benefits and harms, and in the book and in journal articles,Bailenson and his team present a balanced picture. For example, studies thatfeatured participants inhabiting avatars that were elderly or different racesfound nuanced results indicating that, along with the potential to arouseempathy, VR simulations can also exacerbate stereotypes and biases. And a lookat VR “field trips” found both the potential for facilitating learning throughexploration that is not possible in any other medium—and increasedopportunities for pupils to become distracted or goof off. Much of their workpoints to areas that need further study, such as the effects on children orlonger-term impacts on all participants.

Bailenson ends the book with a plea for developers toconsider the ethical impact of their work and adopt a set of “looseguidelines”: Ask yourself whether what you are creating needs to be inVR; don’t make people sick; and be safe. He shares his rules of thumb for workingwithin these guidelines, such as, “VR is perfect for things you couldn’tdo in the real world, but not for things you wouldn’t do in the realworld. Flying to the moon like Superman is okay. Participating in virtual massmurder—especially if it is designed to be realistic—is not.”

As VR seems set to become a transformative force in the eLearning arena,Bailenson’s experience and guidelines offer much for L&D professionals tothink about. Experience on Demand, as well as a long list of researchpapers that VHIL researchers have published—and generously made available on the VHIL website—exploresthe uses, effects on users, and potential benefits and limitations of VR. LearningSolutions will dive deeper into the potential of VR to impact eLearning inareas ranging from trainingvolunteers to respond to a mass casualty event  to driving behavior and culture change; TheeLearning Guild focuses on the potential of VR in the eLearning arena at itsannual Realities360conference.