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Tag: VR

Free tech eliminates the fear of public speaking – University of Cambridge

As revealed in a recent publication from Macdonald – Director of the Immersive Technology Lab at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge – the platform increases levels of confidence and enjoyment for most users after a single 30-minute session. In the most recent trial with students from Cambridge and UCL, it was found that a week of self-guided use was beneficial to 100% of users. The platform helped participants feel more prepared, adaptable, resilient, confident, better able to manage anxiety. […]

With the new VR platform, a user can experience the sensation of presenting to a wide range of photorealistic audiences. What makes Macdonald’s invention unique is that it uses what he calls ‘overexposure therapy’ where users can train in increasingly more challenging photorealistic situations – eventually leading to extreme scenarios that the user is unlikely to encounter in their lifetime. They might begin by presenting to a small and respectful audience but as they progress, the audience sizes increase and there are more distractions: spectators begin to look disinterested, they walk out, interrupt, take photos, and so on. A user can progress to the point where they can present in a hyper-distracting stadium environment with loud noises, panning stadium lights and 10,000 animated spectators.

AI, education, technology, training, universities, VR

03/04/2025
What went wrong with Horizon Worlds? Former Meta devs share surprising insights – and a solution – New World Notes

I’ve always believed the fundamental problem is that Meta leadership never truly understood the Metaverse, and simply treated it like a 3D version of Facebook. In interviews for the book, it also became clear to me that most of the people working on Horizon Worlds weren’t themselves experienced or passionate about virtual worlds. Indeed, in 2022, Meta leadership sent out an internal memo requiring employees to dogfood Horizon Worlds more (i.e. actually play it).

It was actually worse than that, this ex-developer tells me. Required to dogfood their own virtual world, the engineer tells me, many Meta staffers automated their dogfooding: “Before I left they were mandating that employees spend a certain number of hours per week in the game actively playing it. So therein started an automation war where all the people with 200 hours a week never actually played the game once. People just had to launch the game with an Android command over USB, then make sure the proximity sensor on the headset was taped to keep it on.”

Yes: Instead of playing Horizon Worlds, developers of Horizon Worlds at Meta figured out a hack where they could just pretend to do so.

Meta, metaverse, VR

14/03/2025
‘An ideal tool’: prisons are using virtual reality to help people in solitary confinement – The Guardian

Williams first had the idea to bring VR into prisons five years ago. After founding Creative Acts in 2018, she said she “got real tired of hearing people come home after life sentences, having done multiple decades inside, and literally landing on a different planet”. She felt there was an urgent need for her organization to visually puncture the concrete barriers separating incarcerated people from the outside world. “As the world was changing out here, we missed it,” said Star Van Pool, Creative Acts’ program facilitator, who was incarcerated for 17 years.

So when Williams heard about a rudimentary VR program led by correctional officers in another state, she began to workshop how her organization could safely and humanely adapt this work. “I was looking for something that would bring the outside world inside. I heard that VR works on your brain as if you’ve had the experience,” Williams said. “It seemed like an ideal tool.”

psychology, society, VR

13/03/2025
The second wave of immersive institutions has arrived—how can traditional museums and galleries harness their power? – The Art Newspaper

Museums and galleries have a fresh opportunity to work with a new type of digital art venue that is spreading around the world, with the power to tell interactive stories of cultural heritage to multiple users using free-roam VR headsets

art, design, galleries, museums, UI, UX, VR

14/02/2025
The Augmented City: Seeing Through Disruption – Jacobs Institute at Cornell Tech (pdf)

What is the next disruptive technology to reshape the urban public realm? And how can they better anticipate its effects upon arrival? … What are future uses of augmented reality in cities, and what are the implications for managing public space and safety? […]

This report explores future threats and opportunities for cities posed by the next wave of potentially disruptive technologies, headlined by AI and AR. Before further unpacking these futures, it’s important to define key terms, technologies, and context — such as the difference between augmented-, virtual-, and mixed-reality (not to mention “spatial computing”). In addition, how do practices such as “luxury surveillance” and “digital redlining” combine to create “diminished reality?” And does “the metaverse” really mean anything at this point? (Not really.)

AR, cities, environment, future, metaverse, technology, urban, VR

20/01/2025
Meta Horizon Worlds has been taken over by children – WIRED

This cultural shift is only growing more acute as the prices of VR headsets continue to drop, making them more accessible to more families, and as the big platforms build out new content tiers to appeal to younger and younger audiences. Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, says that for a long time, people have worried about how VR affects kids. Usually, they’re worried about the prospect of adults harassing kids. That is a valid concern, of course, and still a very real problem. But in some ways, that dynamic has flipped.
children metaverse video-games vr

children, metaverse, video games, VR

14/11/2024