How VR can show us life, death, and the consequences we’re blind to | Big Think

So 'Melting Ice' is the first of four in a docuseries, 'This is Climate Change'. I had the privilege to travel to Greenland with Vice President Al Gore and see the landscape through his eyes. And it’s just this majestic, beautiful glacial world, but it’s collapsing in front of you.

So we would place our cameras, and I would actually time it to run underneath the glacier, and place the camera and run out before these giant blocks of ice came crashing down. And so the final experience is: you look up and you’re at the base of this glacier and you’re watching these enormous chunks of ice just crash down in front of you.

And it’s very different than watching it on a flat screen, it feels, you know, you’re watching it, it’s distant, it’s something a little more abstract. In VR that screen melts away, and you’re in it. You feel like those chunks of ice are coming for you. It sounds like it’s crashing right in front of you and you see this wave of water wash over below where your feet should be.

And so it’s a very different experience when you’re feeling and hearing the Earth change at such a rapid pace. We then followed the glacial melt down these wide, two-mile-wide rivers of silt, and it would concentrate down into this one narrow chasm, and I remember standing next to this chasm of water that was just—the incredible intensity of it was so powerful, and feeling very small and realizing just this Earth, that once we unleash the power that is latent within it it is going to be very difficult to reverse it.

And so it’s trying to capture these experiential moments of climate change and distill it down to these discrete experiences so that we can understand it like we were actually witnessing it, and take the science and translate it into something that we can embody, that we can feel, and even take a perspective of not even—it’s taking an impossible perspective.

And so we used a lot of drone shots to be able to lift you out of your normal everyday height and place you into another perspective to see the world changing as it is so rapidly right now. There is the potential to overwhelm a viewer. This is a very intense medium and if you place people into intense situations they’re going to respond to it.

And so it is this balance, I think, of finding experiences that match to someone’s own experience level. And we know that if you put someone into an experience that’s too intense they’ll pull the headset off and have that feeling to flee. And so that isn’t very helpful.

We’re really trying to find a balance where you are guiding someone in, you’re leading them in and wanting to have them feel safe and secure so that they can explore this world. So we found that having a warm, knowledgeable, and empathic guide or character in these VR experiences helps people sink into it, it helps them put down their defenses and say, “I’m going to be okay and I’m going to be open to this, and I’m going to try it.”

And so that openness, I think, can be fostered. There’s research that shows that the feeling of awe—which can be triggered through beautiful natural landscapes or music—it can dilate time to either feeling shorter or longer. And we find that consistently in VR, that time changes. People don’t know how long they’re in a VR experience. Sometimes twice as long or half the amount of time that they estimate than that it actually was.

So there’s definitely some time dilation already happening in VR. Awe also triggers feelings of openness, of being more receptive to new ideas, people, general experiences. And so I think it’s important to cultivate this openness when putting someone into an intense experience.

This medium is having to raise questions that take things to another level; can we have people really dive down into these hard problems and experience what it might be like to be in a famine-like condition, or in the inferno of a wildfire, or in the kill chute of a slaughterhouse? These are very intense things—life and death. But it's absolutely critical that we under...