How Virtual Reality Will Change Who We Are

FROM BIG THINK

Parag and Ayesha Khanna on April 5, 2011, 7:22 PM

Today marked the publication of the new book Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution by Jeremy Bailenson and Jim Blasocovich.

Infinite Reality gets inside all of the technologies and animation that we now take from granted, from Wii video games to movies like the Matrix and Avatar, and explains how this virtual reality is changing our reality.

In this video on the book’s website, the authors discuss how the human mind perceives interaction with digital avatars as real, opening a whole new world of possibilities for shaping the mind outside of normal social contexts:

Jeremy is the director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), and Jim, one of the original pioneers of virtual reality, teaches at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Very much related to the scope of this book, Jeremy’s recent research has shown the surprising ways in which just a few minutes spent in the virtual environments he has constructed change how we view ourselves and each other once we step back into the real world.

Unafraid to forecast decades into the future, Bailenson and Blascovich are at the forefront of showing how the lines between physical and virtual are blurring in our emerging hybrid reality. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in how the next generation of the Web – 3D immersive reality – will shape and transform us as we engage with it.