Could Virtual Reality Eradicate Regret? Living and Dying in an Age of Experiential Abundance

Dr. Alexandra Ivanovitch

Welcome to Experiential Abundance In Future Shock, Alvin Toffler highlighted the potential growth of an entire sector he dubbed “experience industries” and foresaw the increasing realism of simulated environments. By design, as a simulation-based medium, virtual reality is the “experience industry” par excellence and is establishing itself as the technological conduit by which humanity can design, interact, and inhabit at scale the simulated environments Toffler evoked: “Thus computer experts, roboteers, designers, historians, and museum specialists will join to create experiential enclaves that reproduce, as skillfully as sophisticated technology will permit, the splendor of ancient Rome, the pomp of Queen Elizabeth’s court, (…) and the like.” Fifty years after Future Shock, and five years after Mark Zuckerberg bought Oculus for 2 billion dollars, virtual reality, as it slowly becomes mainstream, is on the cusp of introducing us to a world we have never seen before: one of experiential abundance.

Virtual reality has the unparalleled capacity to simulate worlds, actions, and beings; it is uniquely positioned to digitize experience whether actual or artificial, whether past, present, or future. And, once experience is digitized, it becomes instantaneously and seamlessly re-playable, shareable, and ultimately democratized.

VR, the Ultimate Brain Hack

But can experience be truly digitized, as other artifacts, commodities, processes, or services have been in the past? How real does the VR-powered simulated experience feel to our brain?

Numerous peer-reviewed studies have shown that subjects who are exposed to virtual environments respond realistically to whatever scenario occurs in the simulated world: Subjects feel “presence”—the sensation of being in a certain place, in well-executed simulations, eventually leading what Pr. Mel Slater calls “place illusion.”¹ At the edge of a virtual cliff, individuals will display realistic responses, including heart rate acceleration.

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Once experience is digitized, it becomes instantaneously and seamlessly re-playable, shareable, and ultimately democratized.

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In a groundbreaking study reproducing the Milgram experiment in VR, even though participants very well knew that neither the victim nor the shocks were real, they had the tendency to respond to the situation at subjective, behavioral, and physiological levels as if the pain they inflicted were real². Even more troublingly, in a study conducted by Pr. Bailenson and Dr. Kathryn Segovia, elementary school-age children watched a virtual version of themselves swimming with whales, and many later believed that this had actually occurred in real life—which opens the door for the technology to inject artificially generated memories in subjects’ brains³.

The growing body of peer-reviewed interdisciplinary science which is studying VR’s perceptual and behavioral impact is shining a light on the myriad ways in which we can willingly use virtual reality to trick our brains into experiencing multiple lifetimes into one and work toward a regret-free future.

Life, a Digest. To Be Downloaded from the Cloud?

In a world where immersive technology is ubiquitous, experience becomes the dominant new currency. When will we see marketplaces where individuals can freely exchange experiential wealth, from getting married to skydiving, receiving an Oscar, etc.? The era of existential scarcity will have come to an end. We will then be ready to welcome a newly found abundance of experiences where regret as an emotion has become obsolete. Who will be the early adopters of such an experiential revolution? Those for whom such a future shock can never come too soon: citizens who are dying and do not have much time left, and beyond, the senior population—which is to say, the new majority in the Western world.

At Equity Lab, we use virtual reality to fulfill seniors’ last wishes before they pass. Going back to one’s motherland, seeing the Holy Land, visiting Europe for the first time, going on a safari, swimming with dolphins, climbing Machu Picchu: Immersive technology can allow seniors to check off elements on their bucket lists from the comfort of their living rooms or beds.

Imagine a VR platform that digitizes the most popular bucket list experiences: the fulfilling experiences individuals wish to tick off before they die, made widely available in 3D immersive format. At Equity Lab, we are building the prototype of such a platform, to be made available to seniors in nursing homes, hospices, and senior centers in Miami-Dade County, South Florida.

The moonshot is to digitize through VR and host in the cloud the sum of desirable experiences, so that end-of-life patients can easily access it through head-mounted displays. How will we finish completing such a Herculean task to fulfill such wishes at scale? Thankfully, as we have already started to observe while collecting last wishes with seniors in Miami-Dade County, our dreams are more alike than they are unalike. Regardless of our diverse backgrounds and cultural differences, the number of natural or man-made wonders that this planet hosts and humans universally wish to contemplate within their lifetimes is large but not infinite. In our collective imagination, the pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China, and Niagara Falls already belong to our universal bucket list, and all are but one VR headset away.

Making Last Dreams a Reality through VR

What are the last wishes that have come up most frequently? The number one wish that seniors express is to go back to their motherland. At the point where they feel that they are closing the final chapter of their lives, seniors long to go back to where they were born. We started this project in Miami, Florida, where there is a high concentration of senior Cuban-Americans, and their dearest wish is to go back to Cuba in VR.

In the specific case of senior Cuban-Americans, most of them left the island decades ago never to return, and are now unable to for an array of often compounded political, physical, and/or financial reasons. Virtual reality is now the only option they have to fulfill the last wish of seeing their homeland once more. It is a very emotional experience for them to reconnect to their roots and to their land, beyond years of exile, trauma, and nostalgia (Figure 1).

Figure 1 • Senior Cuban-Americans going back to Cuba in VR in Little Havana’s Domino Park through “A History of Cuban Dance” (created by Lucy Walker).

The second most expressed wish is to visit Jerusalem, to see the Holy Land; a lot of seniors of Christian faith seize the opportunity to do a virtual pilgrimage through immersive technology.

Sometimes seniors who are in wheelchairs or are heavily reliant on canes express very simple wishes such as…to walk.

Last Wishes & Early Adopters

In a youth-centric society, senior citizens are too often marginalized and exposed to social isolation. Peer-reviewed scientific research compiled by the AARP has proven that “loneliness is lethal.” More older Americans are suffering from chronic loneliness, and the long-term health risks can be deadly. There is a 26 percent increased risk of early death due to subjective feelings of loneliness (AARP). A 2018 study, from the May 23 issue of the Journal of the American Heart Association, of patients with heart failure in Minnesota found that in the group of 1,681 men and women, with an average age of 73, the 6 percent who reported a high level of perceived social isolation had a greater risk of hospitalization, ER visits, and early death than those who did not.

When seniors no longer have the means to go out and explore the world, we can bring the world to them. This VR program puts front and center their wishes, dreams, and aspirations, while striving to minimize—if not eradicate—the regret they may feel to have not had access to these experiences in real life. We use virtual reality to protect their curiosity in the face of anxiety, to defend their joy in the face of depression—to protect life in the face of death.

As seniors approach the end of their lives, virtual reality empowers them to benefit from the type of experiential abundance that Toffler hinted at in Future Shock. “Older people are even more likely to react strongly against any further acceleration of change,” Toffler argued. But we have observed in the last few months that in the specific case of using VR to fulfill their wishes, senior citizens are actually eager to experience this era of simulated environments. In this respect, seniors are in a position to show other segments of the population how to enjoy the multiple benefits of this revolutionary computing platform.

This nonprofit initiative, started in November 2018 in Miami, Florida, is called VR GENIE, as we are using immersive technology to grant wishes, just like the genie in Aladdin. The program is funded by the Miami-Dade County Mayor’s Age Friendly Initiative. VR GENIE has already received global media coverage in 32 countries around the world: the US, France, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, South Africa, Kenya, and others.

Could fulfilling last wishes in VR soon be offered as a free existential service in Miami-Dade County’s hospitals, hospices, and senior centers? That is what we are actively working toward.

Equity Lab: Accelerating the Advent of the 23rd Century

Equity Lab is a virtual reality-driven 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that is dedicated to leveraging immersive technology to ameliorate the quality of life of vulnerable populations such as at-risk youth and seniors.

Our first funder and supporter is the Roddenberry Foundation. Gene Roddenberry created the world of Star Trek to help us envision a hopeful future made of peaceful collaboration and exploration. Gene Roddenberry’s family started this foundation to further their father’s worldview and fund pioneering projects that use today’s technology to help materialize Star Trek’s ideals: empathy, community, inclusion, and peace. Equity Lab is relentlessly working to make Star Trek’s vision of a preferred future a reality—before the 23rd century.

A warm thank you to David Kebo, storyteller-in-chief and Shadrick Addy, Equity Lab’s Chief Technology Officer.

Alexandra Ivanovitch, PhD is a creative technologist dedicated to leveraging 21st century technology to ameliorate the quality of life of vulnerable populations such as senior citizens and at-risk youth. Her 501(c)3 non-profit organization, EQUITY LAB, is pioneering a virtual reality program to allow seniors to fulfill their last wishes through immersive technology in assisted living facilities, nursing homes, and hospices in South Florida. She is a former research fellow in Digital Humanities at the Université Paris-Sorbonne, where she taught at all undergraduate levels, and is currently adjunct faculty at Singularity University. She is passionate about harnessing groundbreaking social neuroscience studies and technology from the lab to the real world.

1. Slater, M. (2009). Place illusion and plausibility can lead to realistic behaviour in immersive virtual environments. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1535), 3549-3557.

2. Slater, M., Antley, A., Davison, A., Swapp, D., Guger, C., Barker, C., … & Sanchez-Vives, M. V. (2006). A virtual reprise of the Stanley Milgram obedience experiments. PloS one, 1(1), e39.

3. Segovia, K. Y., & Bailenson, J. N. (2009). Virtually true: Children’s acquisition of false memories in virtual reality. Media Psychology, 12(4), 371-393.