Like any new technology, its most incredible uses might be waiting just around the corner. There are dangers and many unknowns in using VR, but it also can help us hone our performance, recover from trauma, improve our learning and communication abilities, and enhance our empathic and imaginative capacities.

In the world of VR, a football quarterback plays a game against a competing team hundreds of times before even stepping onto the field members of the United Nations embody a young girl in a refugee camp going through her day-to-day life and veterans once again walk through the streets where they had experienced trauma. He offers expert guidelines for interacting with VR and describes the profound ways this technology can be put to use - not to distance ourselves from reality, but to enrich our lives and influence us to treat others, the environment, and even ourselves better. But how does this new medium affect its users, and does it have a future beyond fantasy and escapism? In Experience on Demand, Jeremy Bailenson draws on two decades spent researching the psychological effects of VR and other mass media to help readers understand this powerful new tool. With well-crafted simulations, these experiences, which are so immersive that the brain believes they're real, are already widely available with a VR headset and will only become more accessible and commonplace.

Summary 'Virtual reality is able to effectively blur the line between reality and illusion, pushing the limits of our imagination and granting us access to any experience imaginable.

Bailenson experience on demand