Virtual Becomes Reality review: a tour of Stanford VR Lab

Some days ago, the pioneer Virtual Human Interaction Lab in Stanford headed by the legend Jeremy Bailenson has published on Steam an experience called “Virtual Becomes Reality: A Stanford VR Experience”, that emulates the tour usually offered in-person in the physical location of Stanford. And I tried it for you.

The Stanford VR Tour

The tour used to run in-person for the first 24 people to show up at the lab at 4 pm each Friday, and let people explore and discover what is virtual reality, and some key experiments that the Virtual Human Interaction Lab was doing. It highlighted the amazing applications of this technology and has been attended over the years by more than 15,000 people. According to Upload VR, even Mark Zuckerberg took the tour before deciding to buy Oculus.

Now the Interaction Lab has decided to release a VR version of the tour on Steam so that everyone can enjoy a somewhat similar version of the physical one. This is great because this way people from all over the world can enjoy it without having to go to Stanford: a great choice in this time where the world is affected by a terrible pandemic.

Since Jeremy Bailenson is a legend, and this tour is so famous, I decided to give it a try and give you my first impressions.

(Notice that this review includes enormous spoilers… IMHO since here there is not a story or things that should surprise you, it’s fine… but maybe you have a different opinion)

Gameplay

The Stanford VR tour is a very short experience and lasts only 15 minutes. It starts with you being inside a lab room, and Jeremy Bailenson appearing in front of you and greeting you. He’s a volumetric avatar, and it is very cool that you can find yourself so close to a legend of VR like him. After he introduces you to the lab, you are left to some small experiments that let you evaluate what are the potentialities of VR. There are 9 in total, and they include for example:

• Walking on a plank in a high position
• Embodying a superhero and flying over a city to save a child
• Cutting a tree with a chainsaw to produce paper
• Embodying an avatar of a different gender/ethnicity than yours
• Having a third arm with which you can interact with objects

As you can see, they are very interesting scenarios. Every experiment is very short, and usually, you don’t perform the full experiment, but just a taste of it. For instance, in the case of the plank, you don’t walk up and down the plank for long like in Richie’s Plank Experience, but you just go on it and look for some seconds below you to realize what presence is.

While you try the experiences, there is the voice of Mr. Bailenson that explains to you what experiment you are performing, what have been the results for it in the lab trials, and what conclusions you can draw from it.

After you try all the experiments, Jeremy Bailenson comes again and tells you goodbye. In the end, you can decide if you want to replay some scenes or the whole experience, to re-live it and understand it better.

Personal impression

The bad

The experience is interesting, but honestly, from its premises, I expected a bit more. First of all, its problem is that it is very short, like 15 minutes, and in that time, you can not truly appreciate a tour. Since the whole experience is short, also all the various chapters are limited in time, and usually, you are just given an appetizer of them.

When I was a superhero that had to find a missing child in a big city, I was instructed how to fly over the buildings to look for him, but as soon as I flew over the tallest building of the city to look down for the child to rescue, the narrating voice just told me what was the average time of the people performing that experiment, and what were the results of the study, and then I was asked to do another task. I really wanted to finish the experience, evaluate my performances and compare them to the ones of the other subjects, I wanted to feel the same sensations that the subjects felt when they found the child, but I wasn’t allowed to.

This has been true for all the experiences I have tried: when I embodied an Arab woman, I found myself in front of an old man screaming racist things at me… but the voice of the man had been muted to censor it. Basically, I was just looking at a man moving like crazy in front of me, and so I felt nothing.

All of this is also made worse by the fact that you are continuously moved from one scenario to the other, and this is a bit confusing. Mix it with the fact that you have to follow what the narrator’s voice tells you to do, and it feels like you are a bit a lab rat on which an experiment is being performed 😀

Also, I was disappointed that the experience doesn’t always ensure you are following it. Most of the time, the narrator just assumes that you are doing what he is asking you to do: it is a bit like with Dora The Explorer… even if you don’t answer, she will go on anyway assuming you have answered correctly.

Another thing that disappointed me is that since I am in the VR field since a lot, I already knew many of those experiments, so I have not learned much. Most of the lessons were about empathy or presence, and I’ve already read a bazillion articles about these two topics.

The good

I’ve made a long list of the cons because I was expecting more from Virtual Becomes Reality, and I think this experience had a much bigger potential. But actually, it is not bad at all and I enjoyed it.

First of all, I’ve been able to virtually meet with Jeremy Bailenson: if you are in the VR field, you know he’s a legend of research about AR and VR. Finding him there in front of me, something that probably will never happen in real life has been very emotional for me. He’s created as a volumetric avatar, so he’s really like in real life, he’s not just a CGI avatar. And to make him even more immersive, there is a nice trick that makes his head move so that he always looks at you. This trick truly surprised me, because I think he was a prescripted volumetric video, while instead, he was able to move his head dynamically. I can tell you that the fact that he was always watching me, increased the immersion a lot.

While the experiments were often “truncated”, I have anyway enjoyed some of them. Cutting the tree with a chainsaw I was holding with my hands was a bit emotional, because I felt like I was really killing that tree. Seeing myself in the mirror as an Arab woman was an interesting sensation as well. But my favorite is the last one, where there is a third arm that comes out from your belly and you have to control all your three virtual arms using your only two physical hands. I had read a lot about these experiments on neuroplasticity, but I had never the occasion to try one, so I was pleasantly surprised to try this experience. After the initial weirdness of seeing a long arm coming out from the belly like in a Hentai movie, I learned how to use it, and it was cool that my brain was starting to consider how to interact with objects using three arms and not just 2 anymore.

In the end, how much you enjoy the various experiments also depends on what is your experience in the VR field: if you are new to VR, I think you’ll love them all. They are original and explained in a very clear way, so even non-techie people can grasp everything, while people of the field can also go deeper using the articles related to the experiments that are left in the end as references.

A final happy note on accessibility: the experience asks in the beginning if you can stand up, if you have both hands, and some other questions, so it can adapt to all kinds of people that want to try it. This experience is accessible and inclusive, and I love it for that. Even if it is just 15 minutes long, it has been made for everyone.

Final considerations

All in all, I have a positive impression of Virtual Become Reality by Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. It is a well-made educative experience, and since it only grabs 15 minutes of your life, I think it’s easy to advise every one of you to try it.

If you are a VR newbie, you will learn very fast some key concepts about the use of VR as an empathy machine, as a technology that makes you embody other people so that to learn what they feel, but also as a technology that can help us in understanding better how our brains work. It’s a great way to introduce someone to some important experiments that have been done about VR.

If you are a VR veteran like me, I think that the right mindset to enjoy this experience is thinking that it is a presentation. Don’t consider it a complete VR experience that should surprise you, but consider it as a presentation from Jeremy Bailenson that shows you some of his most interesting studies from the last years. And he does that in the coolest way possible, being there with you and letting you enter for a moment inside those experiments. If you see it this way, you enjoy it for sure.

If you want to try “Virtual Becomes Reality: A Stanford VR Experience”, you can find it for free on Steam at this link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1658530/Virtual_Becomes_Reality_A_Stanford_VR_Experience/. Enjoy it!

(Header image by Virtual Human Interaction Lab)