Virtual Reality: How to Leverage the Changing Landscape of Technology
- Virtual reality is here, it’s affordable, and it’s changing business practices.
- Using virtual reality to influence, persuade and teach.
- How to turn today’s video gamers into tomorrow’s customers.
Children in the U.S. spend twice as much time playing video games as they do reading. Virtual reality is their medium of choice. What does that mean for your business? To reach future employees and customers, organizations can leverage virtual reality in two ways—internally, as a powerful teaching and learning tool, and externally, in marketing and communication practices. Early adopters such as Merrill Lynch, Toyota, LinkedIn and Konica Minolta are already seeing dramatic results in learning simulations, training, and marketing effectiveness.
Professor Bailenson draws on his years of psychology experiments in Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab to demonstrate, in dramatic video footage, the power of virtual reality. In a virtual environment, subjects can be persuaded more easily, adopt new behaviors, and gain awareness and empathy for others. Already in practice is Bank of America’s online “Face Retirement” campaign, which uses your picture to show you aging, encouraging young customers to put more money into savings.
Jeremy Bailenson - Associate Professor and Director, Stanford University Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Stanford University
Jeremy Bailenson is the founding director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab and an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford.
His main area of interest is the phenomenon of digital human representation, especially in the context of immersive virtual reality. He explores the manner in which people are able to represent themselves when the physical constraints of body and veridically-rendered behaviors are removed.
Furthermore, he designs and studies collaborative virtual reality systems that allow physically remote individuals to meet in virtual space, and explores the manner in which these systems change the nature of verbal and nonverbal interaction.
Bailenson consults regularly for corporate entities and government agencies including the Army, the Department of Defense, the National Research Council, and the National Institute of Health on policy issues surrounding virtual reality.
His book Infinite Reality, coauthored with Jim Blascovich, was recently quoted by the Supreme Court outlining the effects of immersive media.
He earned a B.A. cum laude from the University of Michigan in 1994 and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University in 1999. After receiving his doctorate, he spent four years at the Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a Post-Doctoral Fellow and then an Assistant Research Professor.
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