Ready Changemaker One
Time to Design High-Impact Tech-Enabled Initiatives
To test-drive your potential future as a data scientist, click here. Put on your virtual reality (VR) headset and start. Fly through lines of code, teleport to datalakes, taste-test the lifestyle as a young professional who just landed a job at a cybersecurity firm. Not really into it? Swipe left and immerse yourself in the next possible professional future that is available for you to preview. Such is the value proposition of the Career Simulator our NGO has developed for Miami-Dade County Public Schools and Pôle emploi in France (National Unemployment Office). Imagine that you are about to graduate from high school and you don’t have the slightest idea of which career path to pursue. What if I told you that there are multiple lives to be pre-lived today? With immersive technology, your future is not an abstract concept far away in time you have trouble envisioning. It’s a place you can visit today.
Multiple groundbreaking studies in cyberpsychology and computer science have repeatedly demonstrated that the brain treats virtual experiences as though they were real-world experiences. What you are exposed to through immersive technology can change the way you see yourself, others and the world around you. What’s more, exposure to inspirational experiences in virtual reality has the power to positively transform people’s perceptions and behaviors in the real world. For instance, a breakthrough Stanford study has shown that embodying a virtual superhero helps people develop their prosocial behavior and altruism in the physical world, and the behavioral change carries over even after the virtual experience is over. First, virtually embody the change you want to be in the material world, and then make that change for real.
We are now in an unprecedented position to harness immersive technology to unlock our human potential independently of the constraints of the physical world: space, time, gravity, scarcity. And no field is left untouched: education, access to employment, healthcare and peacebuilding, among others. This technology empowers us to teleport anywhere, anytime thereby giving us unprecedented access to exponential mobility and opportunity, while posing unique ethics and responsibility challenges.
Forever Young in VR ? Immersive Tech for Healthy Longevity
A 2020 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) points out that nearly one-fourth of adults aged 65 and older are considered socially isolated, and is thus at about a 50% percent increased risk of dementia, a 29% increased risk of heart disease and a 32% increased risk of stroke and is exposed to higher rates of depression and anxiety. Imagine the 3D worlds that will empower older adults to be young again, virtually embody younger and healthier avatars of themselves and tick off elements of their bucket lists together with their family and friends. Enter the Youth Simulator (for which we received a Catalyst Award from the US National Academy of Medicine). The convergence of machine learning and social virtual reality makes it possible to harness neural networks to rapidly generate a photorealistic VR-ready digital twin of your healthier self. Your 3D best self is now available for download. What you embody you become. Youthful health is not part of an irretrievably bygone era, it’s ready to be experienced on demand today and re-lived with your loved ones.
With the support of the Miami-Dade County Age-Friendly Initiative, we crowdsourced the most common bucket list items for older adults in Miami-Dade County, and built a 3D library of dreams for seniors to virtually access and share with their loved ones: visiting the Great Pyramids of Egypt, taking an awe-inducing tour of Notre-Dame in Paris, swimming with dolphins, among other bucket list simulations. Social virtual reality is strategically positioned to dramatically improve older adults’ mental health: it can mitigate social isolation’s damaging physiological and psychological consequences by empowering older adults to reap the benefits of virtual travel and immersive socialization.
With Exponential Persuasive Power Comes Exponential Responsibility
A drastic reduction of hardware acquisition and software production costs has recently democratized access to VR experiences for individuals across the globe. In the coming years, virtual reality has the power to radically transform the way we grow and evolve together for the better – and for the worse. Sifting through science-fiction literature or cinema for a hopeful reference of a virtual reality-powered future? 404: not one optimistic vision to be found. The science-fiction mind almost unequivocally pictures virtual reality as a gloomy accelerator for systematic mind control and mass neuron annihilation.
Coined by Neal Stephenson, the “metaverse” is the massive multiplayer online virtual world which immersive technology enthusiasts hail as the Grail. 2021 Mark Zuckerberg rightfully sees the metaverse as the successor of mobile internet: embodied, experiential, engaging. Let’s not forget that, at the beginnings of the internet lay this vision for a global interconnected brain which would both harness and feed collective intelligence. Not tech monopolies, user data harvesting, filter bubbles nor algorithm biases. We are getting a repeat session, and the stakes are exponentially higher for this catch up round.
In order to abort the scenario of a mind control metaverse and to actualize the humanistic potential of the tech to build better futures, it is imperative that we build VR on a series of foundational principles : privacy, transparency, plurality. In 1964, in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance lecture, Dr. Martin Luther King highlighted the stark disparity between our “spiritual and moral lag" and our high-speed technological progress. Now more than ever, we cannot let immersive tech development outpace the development of our ethics.
Ready, set, build. The race is on.
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In every social impact project, my design philosophy involves three core principles: designing inclusively, leveraging scientific insights, and employing a narrative-driven approach. You can check out my other work here.
Virtually Embody the Change You Wish to See in the Real World
