VR Psychology – Road to VR: Recent Episodes
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Sound Self developer Robin Arnott is starting a publishing label named Orpheus Technodelics to curate and distribute consciousness-hacking VR experiences. ‘Technodelics’, according to Arnott, are digital psychedelics that provide peak experiences aimed at opening someone’s mind to commit to deeper contemplative practices. He sees that spiritual traditions are steeped in level of tradition and seriousness […] The post Orpheus Technodelics is Publishing Consciousness-hacking VR Experiences appeared first on Road to VR.
Jeremy Bailenson founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, and his latest book Experience on Demand traces his academic journey through virtual reality. It’s an intellectual memoir that focuses on his personal work in VR, and the insights that VR provides into human communication dynamics, as well as the impact of VR on […] The post Stanford VR Lab Founder’s Academic Journey with VR, and new Book ‘Experience on Demand’ appeared first on Road to VR.
There is a growing backlash against technology being catalyzed by some of the architects of the persuasive habit-forming techniques. The Guardian does a survey of user experience designers and engineers who are taking drastic actions to curtail their personal technology addiction behaviors, and asking some deeper questions about the ethical responsibility of major companies in […] The post Consciousness Hacking & VR: Immersive Tech’s Capacity to Drive Addictions or Transcend Compulsions appeared first on Road to VR.
Do patients with anorexia nervosa suffer from body image distortion due to how they perceive their body or is it due to attitudinal beliefs? Betty Mohler has been using VR technologies to study whether body representation is more perceptual or conceptual. LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST Mohler captured a 3D body scan of patients, […] The post Is Body Image from Perception or Attitude? – Studying Anorexia with VR Self-avatars appeared first on Road to VR.
The Institute of Noetic Sciences was founded by Apollo 14 Astronaut Edgar Mitchell after he had a mystical experience on the way back from being the sixth man to walk on the moon. After finding a description of his spiritual awakening experience as a “samadhi” within the ancient Vedas, he decided to start a science […] The post Models of Consciousness Transformation & Unlocking Latent Human Potentials with VR appeared first on Road to VR.
Dustin Chertoff has pulled experiential design insights from the advertising world to come up with a more holistic theory of Presence in virtual reality. In 2008, he was in graduate school and was dissatisfied with the major theories of VR Presence. His gaming experience showed him how much of his feeling of immersion was related […] The post Using Experiential Design to Expand VR Presence Theory appeared first on Road to VR.
Testimony is one of the most profound and powerful applications of virtual reality that I’ve seen so far. It’s an experimental documentary that captures the stories of sexual assault from five women broken up into five segments. You’re completely immersed within a virtual sphere with these five stories that are represented as sequences of circles […] The post ‘Testimony’ Uses VR to Create an Opportunity to Heal Sexual Assault Trauma and Raise Awareness appeared first on Road to VR.
Eric Metzner identifies as a Techno-Optimistic Futurist who sometimes works an entire second workday within VR exploring different ways to expand his mind. He’s pushing the limits of mental presence by using nootropic supplements for cognitive enhancement from his company Nootroo, experimenting with psychedelics and VR with the psychonauts from /r/RiftIntoTheMind, exploring sensory addition & […] The post The Extremes of Mental Presence: Cognitive Enhancement, Biohacking, Psychedelics, & Transhumanism appeared first on Road to VR.
Hyphen Labs is a immersive design collective made up of women of color, and they were showing a sci-fi VR experience at Sundance this year called Neurospeculative Afrofeminism. Their VR experience features black women as some of the pioneers of brain optimization, and you get to experience a futuristic neurocosmotology lab where you can receive […] The post ‘Neurospeculative Afrofeminism’: Using VR to Build the Future You Want to Live Into appeared first on Road to VR.
Cultivating presence is one of the main goals for a lot of VR experiences, but our brains are like a black box of perceptual soup that makes it hard to know all of the right ingredients to achieve this. Kimberly Voll is a cognitive scientist, programmer, and VR developer who is a part of the […] The post Cultivating Plausibility & Presence in VR with the Concept of the ‘VR Fidelity Contract’ appeared first on Road to VR.
Theresa Duringer has a fear of flying, and rather than treating her aviophobia with VR exposure therapy she’s been experimenting with using VR to just completely opt out of the real-life signals of the flying experience altogether. She’s found some anecdotal success of avoiding some of her fear of flying triggers just by using the […] The post Opting Out of a Phobia with VR appeared first on Road to VR.
STRATA is a new virtual reality experiment from The Mill that taps into biometric data—heart rate, breathing etc.—and produces beautiful procedurally generated worlds to match. No Man’s Sky is the latest and possibly the most high profile example of procedurally generated virtual environments, where in theory no world you ever visit is the same as the […] The post This VR Experiment Generates Beautiful Worlds From Your Biometrics appeared first on Road to VR.
Oculus’ Chief Scientist, Michael Abrash, took to the Facebook F8 conference stage yesterday to tell the audience ‘Why Virtual Reality Will Matter to You’. Much of Abrash’s presentation was dedicated to convincing the audience that the reality we experience is constructed in the brain. He used a series of illusions to show that under the […] The post Abrash Spent Most of His F8 Keynote Convincing the Audience That ‘Reality’ is Constructed in the Brain appeared first on Road to VR.
Mark Farid, a British artist based in London, wants to strap into a head-mounted display for 28 days straight—and we’re not talking about a month of Minecrift. Farid’s new Kickstarter campaign, called Seeing I, is supposed to straddle a fine line between performance art and social experiment, and is devised to explore the personal and […] The post What Happens When You Live in VR for a Month Straight? One Man Aims to Find out appeared first on Road to VR.
While virtual reality is a great tool for entertainment, it’s about more than just games and movies. It has the potential to assist in treatments during therapies in the medical related fields as well. Even now, researchers are beginning to experiment with the ability of VR to treat phobias and anxiety using recently available consumer-level […] The post ‘PHOBOS’ is a VR Therapy Platform for Phobias and Anxiety, Now on Indiegogo appeared first on Road to VR.