In a colorful room, which looks almost like a cartoon, there are thirty people. Fifteen are Albert Einstein, the other fifteen have different appearances from each other, as is normal. No, this is not the beginning of a funny story. It is an experiment conducted in 2018 by the Event Lab of the University of Barcelona, which aimed to demonstrate the effect that the perception of one’s body has on the cognitive abilities of human beings. Well, according to what was measured in the article, wearing Einstein’s body had a positive impact: the fifteen replicas of the German scientist performed better in the intelligence tests proposed to the participants in the experiment. In the article, the researchers write a virtual body, in an immersive environment, “can be perceived as one’s own and this can change perceptions, attitudes and behaviors”.
The Dad in virtual reality
A few years later, in November 2021, Jeremy Bailenson launched the first university course entirely in virtual reality at Stanford. Is called Virtual People and it is a sort of didactic metaverse accessed at the same time by a few hundred students, for whom the much discussed distance learning – or the remote learningas they call it in the US – has definitely changed its meaning.
“The point – explains to Italian.Tech Gaetano Tieri, director of the Virtual Reality Lab of Unitelma Sapienza – is that when virtual reality is involved we cannot even call it properly Dad. That is, it is true that we are not physically present, but VR guarantees the illusion of being in a shared space “. Dad was one of the most talked about forced innovations of the entire pandemic. According to a survey conducted by Almalaurea, over 8 out of 10 university students said they preferred face-to-face teaching. At the base of this answer, the lack of a direct relationship with teachers and fellow students.
How our way of learning changes: the concept of presence
“In Dad – says Tieri – all those who take part in the lesson are spread on a screen, squares in a space that we cannot perceive. When we are in virtual reality, our brain perceives that we share a physical space with other people. This means that we feel the distance from other users, we see the movements of the face, of some parts of the body. In other words, we create a sort of social context, of an environment, albeit virtual “.
The Unitelma Sapienza Virtual Reality Lab is working to exploit the potential of virtual reality teaching also in our country. “We are exploring – explains Tieri – the possibility of carrying out webinars and events in VR, with the aim of breaking down physical distance while ensuring social inclusion through a sensation of presence. In other words, you are at a distance, but you are able to feel part of a group, of a moment of socializing “.
“In practice – he continues – we have experimented with virtual reality teaching in two pilot projects. One involved hundreds of elementary and middle school students, who had the opportunity to learn some basic concepts of Economics and Finance while playing in a virtual reality environment. Another, on the other hand, involved experiences with immersive videos in collaboration with the Faculty of Archeology, which allows you to visit a series of monuments in Rome at 360 degrees, such as the Arch of Trajan or the Colosseum ”.
In Future Presence, an extremely important book for understanding virtual reality, US journalist Peter Rubin explains: “When VR works well, your senses tell your brain that you are truly experiencing what you are experiencing virtually and your brain pushes your body to respond accordingly. This is presence ”.
And it is this last concept that characterizes every type of virtual reality experience. “The scientific literature – explains Tieri – indicates that when people are inside a virtual environment they perceive in a concrete way that they are in a physical space. This acts on our brain and activates areas of the brain that are generally only stimulated when we are actually having an experience in the real world. From the point of view of teaching, this has an enormous value in integrating traditional teaching: on the one hand I read a text, on the other I can live experiences through virtual reality “.
The future of virtual reality
Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement of the metaverse has given a new boost to virtual reality. VR, in fact, is a technology that has been talked about for many years but which, at the moment, has never managed to emerge and become commonly used. “More than anything else – concludes Tieri – is a cultural awareness: we need to tell what this technology is and how it can be useful to us. On this last point there is still some work to be done, because we need to understand well which applications can be the most useful for users. I believe that we could soon reach a phase of mass diffusion, also given the drop in hardware prices “.