VR has always been about solving hard problems. It’s not something that you do for fun yet. That being said, I don’t use VR recreationally. I’ve dedicated my career to VR-I’ve done nothing but think about it during my work life since the late ’90s. Is that what we could see with the metaverse? And does that point to bigger consumer reluctance to use VR and AR? Google Glass went from a failed consumer product to more of a workplace apparatus. The CEO says that lives are saved because decisions are made faster because of the practice from employees who use VR. It’s one of the most incredible success stories of VR, as horrible as that day was. And so they were prepared in a way that they wouldn’t have been had they not done that training. Many of the employees were working that had already trained with Strivr’s active shooter preparation tool. The CEO of Walmart has publicly discussed this. One of the most successful trainings for Strivr is active shooter training. What the metaverse is going to do is that, with all the Strivr training scenarios, we’re now going to be able to do it in teams. or they’re recorded people that we’re beaming in via video capture. Currently, we do lots of things where there are other people around, but those people are either controlled by A.I. In 2016, we pivoted to enterprise, and so the largest client remains Walmart. We began as a football training, training quarterbacks and other players, and then we went to other sports-US Olympic skiing, NBA free-throw shooting. What Strivr does is we put you in this incredibly immersive scene. Ultimately, what’s going to drive VR is that it’s really good for training. And you’re getting thousands of people per day going to places like AltspaceVR or VRChat, but not hundreds of thousands. It has been a killer app of VR since there’s been VR and that remains the case today.
#SUMMER LESSON VR TO WEST SIMULATOR#
When you go through the history of VR, it’s all about training, starting with the Flight Simulator in 1929. You think work and enterprise are going to be huge parts of the metaverse.
We have short bursts with 30- to 40-minute experiences. And I’m very strict-I don’t want to get anyone dizzy ever. If you’re looking at someone talking, you don’t need to be in VR, right? One reason why I want my smaller discussions to be in VR is that it preserves the spatial coherence of the conversation.
Once a week, we do kind of a lecture where we talk about readings and we have guest lecturers come in and we do that over Zoom. More importantly, we’ve been developing a curriculum that leverages what the metaverse is good for. The lessons that we’ve learned ranged from what size group is the best for small-group discussion to how many avatars can you render in the same scene before the whole system crashes. When you combine the two classes, you’ve got 250 students-plus in VR with a group for 10 weeks in a row. Our class was a magnitude of order larger than anything anyone has ever tried.
#SUMMER LESSON VR TO WEST HOW TO#
We’re learning a ton about how to teach and learn in VR. How does the metaverse change what’s possible for teaching? In the last six or seven months, the hardware has gotten good enough where I can do the class I’ve always dreamed of since the late ’90s. I don’t think the hardware was ready nine or ten months ago. We’re doing travel and meditation and medical classes. This fall, I’ve got 178 Stanford students and we are doing incredible things. We spent about 60,000 shared minutes inside virtual reality and did all the things that Stephenson wrote about way back then. We talked and we learned and we experimented and we traveled. So in June 2021, 101 Stanford students all had their own headsets at home and we networked via avatars in the metaverse using a platform called Engage. I volunteered because I’ve been teaching a class since 2003 called Virtual People and I wanted to, given that we were remote anyway, try to do it in immersive VR in the metaverse. In March 2020, when covid-19 hit, Stanford asked professors to volunteer to move their normal teaching load to summer 2021. Imagine the internet skipped the 2D version and went right into VR. Stephenson defines the metaverse as basically the internet, but immersive. Will the WHO’s Covaxin approval answer questions about the vaccine’s trials?īailenson: The term “metaverse” comes from Neal Stephenson’s 1996 book Snow Crash. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Bailenson recently spoke with Quartz about what the metaverse is, the state of metaverse technology, and why the developers of the metaverse can be conscientious about their carbon footprint.
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