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Keeping It Unreal
A virtual-reality visionary discusses the future of the technology.
Posted July 10, 2019 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
What’s reality, really? The question is no longer merely hypothetical: In recent years, innovations, from 360 video to augmented reality to virtual reality, have transformed nearly every facet of life, and the best is yet to come. The Social Brain Blog, curated by The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center Neurological Institute and The Stanley D. and Joan H. Ross Center for Brain Health and Performance, sat down with Will Burrus, founder of the virtual reality content creation studio MDRNTCH, to discuss how VR and AR can help us do anything from teaching us how to fix our furnace to helping us kick that opioid addiction.
Social Brain Blog (SBB): Can you explain the differences between 360 video, augmented reality, and virtual reality?
Will Burrus (WB): Absolutely. Paul Milgram came up with this concept he called the reality continuum, which I was really intrigued with because it felt like an anthropological definition of technology. What he was doing was giving us a way to measure how much our real-world experience is being influenced by digital objects. I like to use this as a guide to explaining the three platforms in this space, which are 360 video, AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality).
360 video is on the reality side of the continuum. That's basically a video you can film in a spherical fashion and then watch to immerse yourself back in. With 360 video, you are reproducing reality. You can't interact with it, but you can visualize it. If you've ever wanted to jump into a video, that's what you're doing with 360-degree video. Now, think of the reality continuum as a dimmer switch. As you're turning the switch on, you're adding more virtual elements into your reality. This is what we call augmented reality - digital objects, real-world experience. With AR, you can make digital renderings of things appear in your physical space, that are not actually there. When the dimmer switch is all the way on, you have virtual reality, and that's where we immerse you into a completely manufactured reality. All your visual and auditory senses are convincing your mind that you are completely somewhere else.
SBB: What are the most common uses of each of these technologies today?
WB: With 360 video, we found great success in using it as kind of a low rigor, low-cost means of evoking empathy by allowing someone to experience something from anywhere. I think 360 video is going to really hit its stride in helping people to share memories. I recently went on a cruise and took a 360 camera with me and filmed the trip. When I got back (home) I was able to go right back to those places we visited. I was able to go back on the beach and hang out with my kids and go back on the boat. I think this technology will be great for events or things that you kind of want to watch and get multiple vantage points as well.
Augmented reality is super intriguing. Right now it's particularly great for marketing or advertising at that zero moment of truth. I can make somebody pop out of the Starbucks building when you walk by it and tell you to come in, which is going to be much more engaging than just reading a sign. You can make things come to life. However, I don't believe it's really hit its stride yet. I don't think it will until the delivery mechanism changes. Right now you largely experience this through mobile devices, but when it gets into glasses, which we are beginning to see some movement in, that’s when we're going to see augmented reality shift. And then I think it's going to become the greatest augmenter of our information that we've ever seen. I think it's going to disintermediate learning to a certain degree. I could look at anything and have all the metadata the interwebs can give me, right there in front of my face. I don't have to actually go seek it out. It's just going to be there. So if I need to fix my furnace, I just look at my furnace and the schematic for my furnace pops up or all the parts pop out and I can put it back together over and over again until I know it. That's where I think we're headed with AR. I think there's a really intriguing discussion to be had about what that tech is going to do to learning because it could potentially disrupt our notion of mastery.
Virtual reality is finding great use because of its impact on cognition and plasticity. Training, I think is going to be the killer app initially since VR is shown to increase retention by 60 to 80 percent: You are doing tasks as opposed to watching tasks. I like to draw a distinction between entertainment VR and cognitive VR. I think we’ll see this huge influx as the devices get cheaper on the gaming front and I think that gaming and entertainment will merge together. On the cognitive side, training, pain management, anything that can help us or better us by influencing the brain, we're going to see that type of activity.
SBB: How did you start your company?
WB: About three years ago I decided I wanted to consult on all of what I call the modern technologies — AI, blockchain, AR/VR. Along the way, I fell in love with VR because it was such a creative and experiential medium. I shifted gears and started focusing on just those projects. I've been in business for the last year and a half just building AR, VR and 360 content. We've done a number of 360 videos for nonprofits to help them reach donors. We’ve helped manufacturers save money shipping equipment to trade shows by creating visualizations that scale what they can just show anywhere. And we've done some really intriguing stuff on the virtual reality side. We’ve built epilepsy simulators, opioid detox simulators.
SBB: Tell us about the opioid detox simulator. That sounds very intriguing.
WB: We were working with a company called Redimere out of California on a product called VTOX. What we wanted to do was create something that would allow people to understand and feel what it is like to be detoxing off of opioids. The thought was to use this at addiction treatment centers with both physicians and families to just make them more empathetic to the patients they're dealing with. So, you go into this experience and you're literally a guy on the verge of an overdose. There's a monologue at the beginning in which he explains the situation and then you are that guy going through some of the physical sensations of coming down off of an opioid high. You feel nauseous, you're getting the spins, your vision is messed up, you're sweating, you're hallucinating, trailing a little bit until you finally have what I call that Hollywood fall. You do the spin and pass out and you wake up in the hospital bed with a doctor kind of explaining some statistics about, about opioid addiction.
SBB: So you are building tools that help create empathy.
WB: That's it. I’ve come to realize that we now have the ability to put people in other people's shoes. I don't think that it's necessarily going to have a definitive impact because most of these are subjective experiences, but sometimes it's just a simple matter of changing your perspective to change the conversation. I have a grandson who is autistic and what kicked me into this cognitive side of VR is that I found an autism simulator in virtual reality and when I put those goggles on, I saw the world through his eyes. Immediately I had a completely different frame of reference for how to raise him.
It’s a lot of work raising an autistic child, especially if they are severe on the spectrum. This is simply because you just don't understand what they're going through. I was able to see how he sees and understand what it feels like to have complete sensory overstimulation. And it immediately changed the way that I dealt with him. So that was kind of the spirit of how we were tackling opioid detox, the epilepsy simulator, the social work training simulator, all of that.
SBB: What do you imagine the landscape will look like a decade from now, both in terms of technological application and how commonly these technologies are going to be found in patient care?
WB: With regards to patient care, what I'm looking forward to are alternative treatments that don't involve drugs or chemicals. I believe that we're going to stumble across some way to use visual [tools] to trick the brain into healing itself. We can create or carve out new pathways that might make a quadriplegic or a paraplegic start moving their limbs again. We're already seeing a lot of traction in pain management. I could see in the very near future where this becomes a viable treatment for pain and rehab simply by tapping into regions of the brain. This technology is showing us how incredible our brain really is, and how much we have the ability to actually control our physical and mental state with it.
SBB: What are the roadblocks to greater VR adoption?
WB: The biggest one is the hardware, hands down. Not having access to that is what keeps this movement from really coming to fruition. I believe that this is going to be the game changer of technology, period. But without ubiquitous access to the goggles, that's a problem.
Then once you get those, it has to be a profitable form factor, right? Some of these units are heavy and cumbersome; you get sweaty in there and it's not comfortable. Now, ironically, the more engaged you are, the more you forget that you have that thing on your head, but that's still an issue and a concern. Another thing we haven't really studied yet is eye fatigue. We're still not certain what the long-term impact of staring at these screens is going to be. So that's a concern.
Vertigo was an issue, but I think that's becoming less of an issue because we're finding that the more points of reference that we put into the virtual experience, the less you feel the vertigo. So adding a nose bridge makes a difference. Adding arms and legs makes a difference. Anything that reconnects that inevitable distance you have between your brain and your body when you go into these virtual experiences reduces that. But that is still currently a barrier.
How to think about these experiences I think is still a big challenge.
People still try to look at virtual reality like they would look at a two-dimensional application but they are completely different things. It's easy to get enamored with the scale of a virtual world, but after a while, you start to notice things like neck pain from looking up at giant screens too long.
Ultimately, this medium is supposed to provide an alternate reality, so this should feel very much like our actual reality. I've wrestled with this thought process quite a bit, getting people to understand that if you don't need props in this world, you don’t need them in a virtual world, either. Building these experiences, it's like a perfect match between filmmaking and software development. But those are two weird worlds to try to bring together.
Those will be some of the barriers to getting it off the ground. But again, the beauty of being early is you have opportunities to establish thought leadership, which then creates the rules of daily use. I think once we hit that certain tipping point, it will normalize and then we'll see these things in droves.
Will Burrus is the founder and CEO of MDRNTCH, a virtual-reality content-creation studio exploring the limits of cognition and empathetic response in simulated environments.
