One technology is VR/AR. The two movies are Inception and The Butterfly Effect. If you’re familiar with all this, well, you can start listening to my three myths.
Here’s what happened.
One day, my colleague Leon and I went for a walk in the Olympic Forest Park. It was still summer, the forest park in The green in Beijing should be very good. As I looked at the unnamable green vegetation in front of me, IT occurred to me that there was a moment last year when MY eyes were full of flowers and green plants surrounded me. It took me only a second to realize, no, that was actually a scene from a VIRTUAL reality demo I played last year.
The demo was actually pretty lame. The pixels were obvious, the resolution was poor, and the plant leaves were crudely made, so it looked fake. But what’s more interesting about it is that even so, when I think of the poorly made scene, the feeling of the forest created by the greenery is still very clear.
Yes, it’s a feeling. Virtual reality has never been about resolution and pixels, but about delivering such a “feel”. And that’s something no other medium can match.
The same thing happened again this year, and I learned it all over again.
Just last month, I went to visit a team of VR indie games in China. The team was brutal. Their founder had previously written films for Peter Chan, so their demos were more focused on emulating the atmosphere that films are good at creating. I tried the demo, which was a scene in a summer afternoon. On a table near the window, there was a 10-year-old desktop computer and a model rocket played in childhood. I played in virtual reality for more than ten minutes with a lazy music in the earphone, feeling very happy.
I am a person who usually has nothing to do. I am used to staying in a daze when I am bored, reminiscing about the past. So, more than a month after the incident, every time I recall my childhood, the scene of a summer afternoon suddenly pops out of my head. I am alone at a table by the window, playing model rockets with lazy music in my ear. It’s a wonderful memory — of course, in fact, I never had such a childhood memory. It’s just a bunch of bits that the computer fed me.
As Leon said a year ago, reconstructing a realistic world is not VR’s greatest skill, but changing the human heart is different. “Like Inception, the power to implant something into someone else’s mind is the scariest.”
Today’s virtual reality, because most of the people who create it don’t realize its true value, which is that it opens in the wrong way, tries to implant some perspective into other people’s minds, which is certainly not possible.
However, one idea I have come to realize recently is that if YOU want to change people’s hearts with VR, you can’t do it in a straight line. You can’t do it directly by “connecting two points to a line”. Instead, you should use multiple path points to reach people with curves.
Just as in Inception, Leonardo plants the idea of abandoning the family business and striking out on his own deep in Robert Fisher’s subconscious, not just by writing it down in his head. He repeatedly dismantled the concept of the idea to be implanted, then translated it into the heir’s understanding of his father’s expectations, and finally inserted the idea of “giving up the family business and going out on his own” using the “curve” of the successful restoration of the father-son relationship.
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That’s what VR needs to change people’s minds.
There are two immediate and conceivable ways that VR can change people’s minds.
One is to change the way you see yourself. Example: you wear the Oculus, see a yourself in the mirror, after the start, the avatar will gradually become thin, and it is that it’s ten minutes to tell the size of the change, the midway stop, effect disappears. The power of this instant feedback is terrifying, and when you can actually see yourself losing weight because of exercise, it makes you believe that you can really lose weight through exercise. What changes is your belief.
The other is to change the way you see the world. In virtual reality, you can instantly become color-blind and see all the leaves turn gray. You can become an African and see what their living environment is like. This experience allows you to truly “put yourself in someone else’s shoes,” which indirectly changes how you view the world and the other person.
But despite these two, I think the third and most interesting way VR can change the mind is by changing “memories”.
When I recalled my childhood, with a demo experience and an extra “memory” of playing with a model rocket, I suddenly realized that VIRTUAL reality can actually reprogram people’s memories. In other words, with VR, your memories are programmable and programable.
If VR can give me a little more than ten minutes of new memories about my childhood, maybe many unresolved feelings in life, many regrets in life, and the obsession of missing something can finally be smoothed out with the help of virtual reality. Because when you have an unforgettable, lifelike experience, years later, you don’t even wonder if it was real, it quietly becomes a truly personal memory.
Here’s how it might work: when you think about it, the scene of a beautiful memory is blurred, and you can’t describe it in detail, but the “feeling” is always there, and it’s very clear. This “feeling” may be realized through the “sense of atmosphere” created by VR immersive experience.
After VR changes memories, how much influence does the reprogramming of those memories have on human perception?
Two films can provide some reference.
In Inception, Leonardo told Ellen Page, a young dream designer, never to try to construct a dream from her own memories, because it would make her lose her sense of reality and virtuality. In the Butterfly Effect (referring to the first film, of course), the hero has the ability to change the real world of his memories by changing what happens in them. When he changed his memory again and again to go back to the past, in fact, he was just trying to save his guilt for a big disaster in his childhood, as well as the knot in his childhood friends.
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Both of these films intentionally or unintentionally connect “memory”, “human heart” and “life” together. It may be hard to say whether a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil will cause a tornado in Texas, but it is easier, I believe, to turn back from the physical world and explore the inner world of human beings. This kind of chain effect caused by subtle factors is more easily realized than the physical world.
I think VR/AR is the key to open the door of this inner world. When you have a little portal like this, you can build something in the human heart. These things, in turn, influence one’s perception of the world and one’s perception of oneself.
But the process may need more psychology-savvy people to engineer the knock-on effects. After all, it’s easy enough to topple the first dominoes, but the hardest part is arranging them first.
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Original articles, the author: Retric, if reproduced, please indicate the source: http://36kr.com/p/5040855.html