Training and therapy absolutely. But this is about empathy, they are claiming the people are more empathetic when they experience a situation in VR than if they haven’t experienced that situation ever in any medium.
I don’t believe they’ve demonstrated that.
At best they’ve demonstrated the people are empathetic but they might be anyway. They definitely haven’t demonstrated that that’s a result of the VR experience. To do that they would have had to have taken some sort of test both before and after the VR experience to see if their attitudes have changed.
Training and therapy are appropriate uses for VR because they don’t need to demonstrate that they are better than real world alternatives, because the benefit they have is cost. They are cheaper in VR than they are in the real world, that’s the only metric they need to pass.
Irrelevant is too strong a word given the opportunities in VR for training or even therapy… but you have a point.
Training and therapy absolutely. But this is about empathy, they are claiming the people are more empathetic when they experience a situation in VR than if they haven’t experienced that situation ever in any medium.
I don’t believe they’ve demonstrated that.
At best they’ve demonstrated the people are empathetic but they might be anyway. They definitely haven’t demonstrated that that’s a result of the VR experience. To do that they would have had to have taken some sort of test both before and after the VR experience to see if their attitudes have changed.
Training and therapy are appropriate uses for VR because they don’t need to demonstrate that they are better than real world alternatives, because the benefit they have is cost. They are cheaper in VR than they are in the real world, that’s the only metric they need to pass.