As the founding director of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Jeremy Bailenson firmly believes that statistics don't make people care about issues.
Experiences do.
That's why Bailenson has spent the last few years developing an underwater virtual reality (VR) experience that shows people firsthand how climate change impacts ocean health.
It sits beside a mountain of past research Bailenson and his team have conducted into empathy and altruism that determine how and why people care about various subjects.
All the data in the world won't make a problem seem real unless people care about it on an emotional level, he says.
According to Bailenson, virtual reality solves that problem without creating new ones.
"What you get is this wonderful catch-22, which is that the brain treats it like a direct experience, but you can do it without harm, risk, or expense," he tells Tech Insider. "You can get free experiences."
That promise — a free way to show people how badly their daily habits pollute the environment — is one Bailenson is now turning into a commercial product.
He has plans to bring his underwater experience, which puts people directly inside the rock-filled reefs off the Italian island of Ischia, to middle school and high school classrooms around the country by 2016.
First, they'll rely on rudimentary platforms like Google Cardboard, with stories similar to the New York Times' roll out of "The Displaced," a VR story focusing on children forced from their homes because of war.
Later on, Bailenson says the goal is to move into more sophisticated systems, like Oculus Rift, that can be rigged in larger settings to make the experience totally immersive. In September, Tech Insider visited one such facility — The Void, in Lindon, Utah — where users navigate built environments and feel real temperature changes.
For Bailenson, the trick will be incorporating experiences focused on larger social issues into an industry that thrives on sports, dystopia, and war.
"When I meet with the video game companies, I say 'Alright, so you have your game of going around shooting people. And that's fun; that's your call. How about this compromise: every time you level up in your game, you pause and do a 30-second public service announcement where you learn about deforestation?'"
Surely, the powers that be would find such a prospect jarring and unpleasant for the gamer in question?
"You know, I've gotten surprisingly good responses to that," Bailenson says. "I certainly don't have anything in writing yet, but video game makers — they aren't trying to hurt anybody. I think I can get good reception on these environmental conservation scenes in between levels on video games. I think it's a neat way to think about it."
Ultimately, and unfortunately for planet Earth perhaps, Bailenson's main challenge in the future could be competing with an industry he helped create.
As VR takes off — and many say it's almost sure to — new immersive video games will saturate the industry. People will grow to expect more from their games, and activists like Bailenson could find themselves fighting for the same kind of attention they're currently trying to capture in this reality.
"It's always a challenge to create media that people want to look at," Bailenson says. He concedes that the best he can do is make the experience engaging and fun and educational without it feeling preachy.
If he checks those boxes, people might discover that a brief dive into Italian waters to learn about the harmful effects of CO2 ends up being a richer and more eye-opening activity than shooting aliens with a ray gun.
