And, and what we do in Neuromancer is we read it and we pick out every instance of a changed-human. There's 200 students in it, which is about 5% of the undergrad population at Stanford, and there's two textbooks. I'm teaching a class at Stanford right now - it's called Virtual People. The fact that you were networking, the con-sensual, the people sharing their senses. Mason: So what was it specifically about William Gibson's Neuromancer that inspired you to work in virtual reality? Was it this notion of the consensual hallucination?īailenson: I mean that was part of it. I'm going to build these avatars and study how they work.' And that's when I decided to shift. How about instead of trying to build intelligence, I'm just going to fake it. I was kind of stagnating there, and I wasn't loving it, and at the time I read this crazy book called Neuromancer and decided, 'Huh.

Infact, in the late 1990's my PhD was in Cognitive Science, where we were learning about how you can model thought in terms of representing how reasoning works how categorization works running experiments on humans and building computer simulations on how to model that. Mason: Was that the thing that made you think that VR was the thing that you wanted to be part of? Or was it more of the science fiction that you were reading at the time?īailenson: Certainly that planted the seed, but for me the icing on the cake was actually re-reading Neuromancer in graduate school. Imagine 1994 VR: it was running at a quarter of a second lag, and the tracking was way off, they had to reboot the system a couple of times to make it work, but it was still really special! It was a video game where you put on the goggles, and it was a networked VR experience, and you played some type of a video game. I had a spare day, and I walked down to the Embarcadero in San Francisco, and there was an arcade on the Embarcadero that we had to wait in line - I think we paid 25 bucks back in '94 - and they had something called Dactyl Nightmare.

I was interviewing for grad school at Berkeley.

Mason: So, Jeremy Bailenson, I've got to ask you: when was your first Virtual Reality experience? This episode was recorded on location in London, England at the offices of publisher W.W. Jeremy shared his thoughts on how virtual reality experiences can change our perception of self, increase empathy, and lead to new forms of social interaction. Leveraging this paradox, which is that the brain treats it as real, but you can do the impossible - you can do anything - is a really neat way to use VR.' - Jeremy Bailenson, excerpt from interview 'The cool thing about VR is you can do things that you can't do in the physical world. On this episode I speak to the Founding Director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Jeremy Bailenson: Luke Robert Mason: You're listening to the FUTURES Podcast with me, Luke Robert Mason.

Experience on demand jeremy bailenson