A while back I had the pleasure of spending some time with astronauts. When you spend any time talking with astronauts, the ones who have actually spent time up in outer space, you come away with a different view of things.
The astronauts and cosmonauts who have spent time together on the International Space Station see the world differently than the rest of us, quite literally. For one thing, their flight takes them around the Earth once every 92 minutes.
These are all highly trained engineers, with an extremely practical bent. Yet they report that the experience changes them on a deeper level than mere intellect, both politically and spiritually.
When they look down toward the surface, they do not see borders between countries. Rather, they see a beautiful and highly fragile planet, a unified thing of pure beauty.
They come to stop thinking of themselves as “American” or “Russian”, and to begin thinking of themselves as one with all of their fellow human beings. Apparently it is impossible to remain nationalistic or to emphasize tribal differences after you have had such a profound experience.
Maybe a good use for shared VR would be to give an experience like this to other people, starting with the politicians of our respective nations. It’s a long shot, but if it works, we might just end up saving both our planet and ourselves from destruction and tragedy.
This was the objective of one of our MDM projects in the summer of 2017. Professor Bernhard Reike is the lead investigator. The “overview effect” has quite a bit of research going on. http://ispace.iat.sfu.ca/riecke/
Wonderful! I wonder whether it would have an even greater effect if the participants were physically co-located, as are the astronauts in the International Space Station, as well as participants in our lab’s co-located immersive mixed reality experiences.