>This is all true but it can be a little bit of survivor ship bias at play. Look at all the technology conferences over the last 40 years and for the most part you will see a grave yard of tens of thousand of ideas that looks promising but ended up going nowhere

Survivor bias is real, but the interesting failures (in comparison to VR) are things like 3D TV.

3D TV has a very weak effect, the 3D effect is basically dismissed after a while, after you get immersed in the actual content. A bit like watching a (good) silent movie, at first it's jarring, but after an hour you don't notice it anymore.

On the other hand, because VR is so immersive, the effects on the brain are quantifiable, it is fundamentally different than all other forms of media. You can permanently change your brain with VR in ways that are literally impossible with letterbox media. It can change your brain, in a way that no technology has ever been able to before ('Strategic modification of Bayesian priors' if you're into the science).

That kind of thing is why VR is a guaranteed success, it's not just about the fact that movies and entertainment and games will get to a new level, but the psychological possibilities for actually modifying the self with VR are going to ensure we all have headsets in a decade.

VR is immersive to a degree that it tricks your brain completely. It can activate powerful biological mechanisms that cannot be done in other digital/scaleable ways. For example, there's a company in Spain called Virtual Bodyworks, founded by the VR researcher Mel Slater, which can affect your implicit bias with body swaps performed in VR. This is genuine selective neural net-surgery, done in a way that cannot be replicated outside of VR.

The company I work at has a smoking-cessation VR app, takes 5 minutes for some people to go from decades of unbroken addiction/40 smokes a day/first smoke within 5 minutes of waking, to not even being able to think about smoking. There is no way to do what we do with a phone app or even a 3DTV, it requires VR.

That kind of software is going to be the reason VR will take off, it's capable of changing the mind in ways we can't imagine at the moment.

Not to mention that spatial computing is the 'final form' of human machine interaction, plenty of research on that.

> The company I work at has a smoking-cessation VR app, takes 5 minutes for some people to go from decades of unbroken addiction/40 smokes a day/first smoke within 5 minutes of waking, to not even being able to think about smoking. There is no way to do what we do with a phone app or even a 3DTV, it requires VR.

Five minutes to quit smoking? There is one app that claims to be clinicly proven and even they only claim 33% of users actually quit after completing the program.

'only 33%' is not so bad, that's basically a market-leading rate. 10 weeks of CBT is the established benchmark for 'proven' tobacco cessation, and has a 2 year 33% success rate (IIRC).

Most of the tobacco cessation products top out at 33% for some reason, but combining them gives higher success rates.

What app are you referring to btw? Very interested in this area at the moment.

While I'm not sure that

> we [will] all have headsets in a decade

you do mention a couple things I hadn't considered or heard of before.

> The company I work at has a smoking-cessation VR app

This sounds very intriguing! Could you possibly provide some references and/or the name of your company? (I don't smoke but I'd love to understand better how this works.)

More generally, how do you stay on top of what's happening in VR tech & applications? I'm asking because I've clearly been missing out on some significant developments.

>While I'm not sure that

>> we [will] all have headsets in a decade

I'll take that bet. I'm a kind of tech-cynic, have a Nokia 8110, ten year old thinkpad and listen to minidiscs. But in January I'll fly to the states and buy a Vision pro day 1. The last time I was this excited about a technological innovation was with OS X. My brother was a CS guy and he recommended I buy an iBook when I started university because he thought OX was going to be a game changer. And in the beginning it was weird to have the only Apple in a lecture hall with 300 Dells. But 10.1, 10.2, 10.3... It felt like being on the cutting edge.

That's what the Vision Pro looks like to me. The Powerbook 12" all over again, future-tech.

>Could you possibly provide some references and/or the name of your company? (I don't smoke but I'd love to understand better how this works.)

It's really simple as hell, there's an effect called the 'Garcia' effect, whereby if you feel sick ≈6 hours after eating or drinking a novel taste, you get a lifelong aversion to that taste of smell. It's highly conserved, found in every animal studied with the sole exception of vampire bats (they only have one dietary option).

And this was used in tobacco cessation in the 60's. There's a lovely case study where a 14 year old boy is given apomorphine three times while smoking, he vomits so copiously he passes out at one point, but literally can't smoke afterwards.

It fell out of favour because injecting people with opiates to induce uncontrollable bouts of vomiting wasn't a popular way to treat smoking.

We just do with a simple VR spinning room, you take as long a break from smoking as you can comfortably manage, light up and then do our 'aversion' session for 5 minutes, or as long as you can manage.

From that, we see around 20% of people that are unaffected (the efficacy is dependent on a factor that varies ≈10000:1 across a normal population).

For most people, you get some effect, and for around a third you get an instant reaction where even 2-3 5 minute sessions mean they just can't smoke. They can cave to cravings and light up... and then just have to throw the cigarette away in disgust.

https://sickofsmoking.app/

Nicorette meets Clockwork Orange in a way.

>More generally, how do you stay on top of what's happening in VR tech & applications? I'm asking because I've clearly been missing out on some significant developments.

Very difficult, so much happening in various silos. Jaan Aru and Mel Slater are probably the two researchers I try to follow as much as possible, but this is a prescience at the moment, so even finding common terminology is a challenge.

This is fascinating, thanks for elaborating! Do you think a similar therapy would work in the case of alcohol addiction? I.e. drink a glass of some high-proof spirit, put on the VR glasses with the app, profit(?)

yes basically, in fact when we talk to people about this, around 50% of people have had some experience of this in their life (with me it was Kiwi fruit after a long car ride, I associated them with the nausea and couldn't eat kiwis for around 20 years).

Of that 50%, around a half or so have a history of this with some kind of alcohol. I have one friend who will almost puke if he smells whiskey, because of one terrible night in Norrköping with a bottle of Paddy's.

So, I can see just how this would work super well and make people quit smoking. The power of headsets to induce extreme nausea is surely ever-present.

Will it also cause aversion to headsets and to VR? :)

>Will it also cause aversion to headsets and to VR? :)

Unlikely, the Garcia effect is tightly coupled to taste/smell. Could inadvertently give a lifetime aversion to any food/drink though, especially if it's a new taste.

I think the key is that this is not a VR device but an AR one. The illusion is harder to maintain in AR but if you manage it is way more tricky. The difference between VR and AR is undervalued in the discussion. imho, the ability to do a credible AR (due to superior computational power and the abundance of sensors) _could_ be the key for Vision success

Except it's not really--in the sense of an out-in-the-world-walking-around HUD. And certainly the keynote emphasized in-home entertainment and (I think?) gaming. It's got elements of AR to it but it seems much more like VR+. (And Apple was almost certainly smart to just coin their own term.)

I don’t know, I think you are a bit overhyping the effects, but anyway — this is very creepy. Even if the effect stops at being able to manipulate people on a short-term (e.g. in-“game” transactions, etc) basis more effectively than the already criminal (morally) existing manipulations.

Also, I tried looking into the Strategic modification.. paper? but didn’t find it.

I think I'm being pretty mild on the effects :) But maybe that's the enthusiasm of working in the field.

And yes, it's creepy for sure. There is a theory that every generation witnesses a key technological development and is 'lost' to that development, and the generation that grows up with that technology is immune to it. I imagine VR is going to be a technology like that, there will be people 'lost to it' in the same way that people were lost to TV or to smartphones today ( ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Olt-ZtV_CE ). Ethically VR is going to be a minefield.

Here's the paper that coined the phrase:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.0035...

And here's I think one of the better papers giving that explanation in terms of VR.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30553934/

Although I come more from a mechanistic/biological background, but there the research has not come so far, AFAIK.

Although Catherine Dulac and Christian Broberger are on the cutting edge in that area.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtiZb-kuexU

That lecture is a fantastic place to start, and the statement at 6:55 is key to seeing why VR is going to be a game changer.

*edit*

Maybe also this lecture too, the shear scale of the visual system in the brain is another key aspect to how VR can be so powerful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2jfPZLhTIY

Thanks for the reply, will be checking out your links!

> On the other hand, because VR is so immersive... tricks your brain completely

I find there is a similar acclimitisation effect to 3DTVs. Do a repetitive task in VR and it doesn't take long for VR to not matter. If you use VR everyday the wow disappears and desktop gaming can be a refreshing change. Only after a decent refractory period might you put on a headset and get some sense of magic again.

> takes 5 minutes ... no way to do what we do with a phone app or even a 3DTV, it requires VR.

Oh, you are snakeoil salesman. I regret responding.

The company I work at has a smoking-cessation VR app, takes 5 minutes for some people to go from decades of unbroken addiction/40 smokes a day/first smoke within 5 minutes of waking, to not even being able to think about smoking.

Emphasis mine.

This is a meaningless statement.

I argue the only valid statistic is x% remain non-smokers at y years, something comparable to other methods.

And even if your company’s method does turn out to be statistically significant, that doesn’t necessitate everyone owning the device, only the clinic needs to.

I mean, super early days and they're talking their book, but this is definitely a massive use case for VR.

I thought about this a while back, you could definitely do aversion therapy treatments potentially more effectively with a VR setup.

> that doesn’t necessitate everyone owning the device, only the clinic needs to.

If this approach works, then it will be super widely adopted as it costs insane amounts of money to drive behaviour changes right now, and lots of health services would be interested.

>I argue the only valid statistic is x% remain non-smokers at y years, something comparable to other methods.

Absolutely agree, but our problem is time, we did our first patient around 8 months ago, so we're just limited by that timeline.

So far so good though, followup shows classic Aversion reactions, the people that were affected still have a very strong reaction to the taste and smell.

> A bit like watching a (good) silent movie.

A bit off topic but in this context I found “Dogville” to be interesting.

Absolutely! What a movie.

Also makes me think of 'The testament of Dr. Mabuse', totally incredible film.

A very elaborate way of saying that people are gonna fry their dopamine receptors on VR porn.

You may be right about what you're describing, but this sounds incomparably more like bullshit than any chance of being right.

I've played with VR, and it's really not that immersive - no more than any other good media.

In particular, VR is definitely not as immersive as actual reality, so anything that could be done in VR to convince someone of non-fantastical things can also be done (at a higher expense, for sure) with actors and props. So, your claim about 5 minutes to quit smoking has no reasonable chance of being true from where I'm sitting.

>n particular, VR is definitely not as immersive as actual reality, so anything that could be done in VR to convince someone of non-fantastical things can also be done (at a higher expense, for sure) with actors and props. So, your claim about 5 minutes to quit smoking has no reasonable chance of being true from where I'm sitting.

Well yeah, it can be done in real life, it's just much more brutal.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/000579...

https://sci-hub.st/10.1016/0005-7967(63)90042-1

A fourteen-year-old boy was said by his parents to have started smoking at the age of seven, and to be spending every penny of his pocket money on cigarettes. He had at one time regularly smoked 40 cigarettes per day, but was now averaging about half that number because his pocket money had been reduced. He said he wanted to give up smoking because he had a smoker’s cough, was breathless on exertion, and because it was costing so much money. Physical examination and chest X-ray were normal.

Treatment was given in the outpatient department. On the first occasion he was given an injection of apomorphine l/20 g, and after seven minutes he was told to start smoking. At eleven minutes he became nauseated and vomited copiously. Four days later he came for the second treatment, and said that he still had the craving for cigarettes, but had not in fact smoked since the previous session because he felt nauseated when he tried to light one. He was given an injection of apomorphine l/20g, and after seven minutes he lit a cigarette reluctantly, and immediately said he felt ill. He was encouraged to continue smoking, and he collapsed. He was given oxygen and an injection of Coramine. When he recovered he was very hungry and asked for food, which he ate voraciously. Four days later he was given apomorphine l/40 g. and vomited as soon as he attempted to light a cigarette seven minutes later.

When he next attended he said he no longer had any craving for cigarettes, and he made two interesting comments: “When f see an advert on T.V. for cigarettes, it seems like a dead advert. ” “Just smoke from my father’s cigarette makes me feel ill”

Two months later he left school and started working. He said he had “got a bit down” at work and wanted to “keep in with the others”, so he had accepted a proffered cigarette. He immediately felt faint and hot, and was unable to smoke. It is now a year since his treatment, and his parents confirm that he no longer smokes.

The only reason this experiment seems to have worked is because it was brutal. So not sure what the relevance is. I imagine you could induce serious vertigo through VR in someone, and associate it with smoking in the same way, but that's still brutal and a form of aversion therapy, which brings serious ethical concerns from my point of view (particularly if applied to a child).

>they had compititors that had better products but to Microsofts luck, could never get a foothold in the market.

hmm, this seems to be a rather biased description of the history.

There were any number of better operating systems at the time than DOS, especially in the 1.0 timeframe. CP/M was arguably at least on par. Any number of 16-bit minicomputer operating systems. Probably a bit early for Unix realistically.

perhaps my tendency to expression is overly ironical and indirect at the cost of clarity and obviousness, but I meant it seemed biased that Gates described the reason why MS won out over superior tech was due to 'luck'

Clearly Microsoft did lots of things right (and wrong) over the years. And one of them was creating DOS in the first place. But IBM could have presumably gone in a different direction for the IBM PC fairly easily. And had they done so, it's reasonable to speculate you might never have heard of Microsoft.

Compared to Unix and especially modern operating systems DOS is more comparable to firmware than OS, it was something ultra minimal which basically got out of the way of developers. And being so minimal it allowed IBM PCs to sell for prices below $10,000 (1980s! dollars). This was they key to the success of Microsoft and the IBM PC. You might have created a ‘better’ OS at the time, but no one cared about your fancy slow OS which used all the memory cost a fortune in hardware.

It is biased as it is coming from the winners. But it does say something that Gates was willing to admit that it was because of some glorious amazing product that they were successful.

A big part of it was also Gates ruthless business practices.

> Bill Gates once said that in some ways Microsoft was lucky to be as succesful as they where, that they had competitors that had better products but to Microsofts luck, could never get a foothold in the market.

Bill Gates famously engineered his own luck by opposing a free market.

> a little bit of survivor ship bias at play

I am not sure why you are focusing on "survivor bias". My comment was about being a programmer and the fun of seeing a new technology that is an undefined territory to explore.

But I did directly mention that many of these do not workout as as I referenced: amiga, os/2, palm, and VisiCalc and Lotus 123

However, so that you may have some idea of my personal "survivor bias", here is a super simplified multi-dimension history of my over 43 years of computing smashed into a linear list with massive things forgotten:

  TRS-80 Model III, LDOS, BASIC, VisiCalc, 
  modem-to-modem
  TRS-80 Model 100
  CompuServe
  MS-DOS compatible, MultiPlan, TurboPascal, dBase
  Windows 3.0
  DesqView  
  Delphi Online 
  OS/2, REXX
  Macintosh System 7 --> 1993 to OS X
  Dial-up ISP
  Solaris, Perl
  BBEdit
  Windows 95
  Palm Pilot 
  Linux for Servers --> 1998 to Today
  Linux Desktop
  ColdFusion
  Apache 
  Python --> 1999 to Today
  Always on Internet (ISDN, DSL, Cable) --> 2004 to Today
  Nokia cellphones
  PHP
  Zope/Plone
  Mac OS X --> BETA to Today
  Windows XP
  Nginx
  iPhone --> 2009 to Today
  SublimeText
  Windows 10 --> 2018 to Today
  VS Code --> 2018 to Today
  NodeJS --> 2018 to Today
  SvelteKit --> 2021 to Today
  KDE Neon --> 2022 to Today (the year of Desktop Linux arrived for me)
  

The longest thread is from 1993 to Today is what is now known as macOS, but for about the first 15 years of my usage Apple was considered at risk of failure. MS Windows was always a part of my world, but seldom my primary focus, it has only been since 2018 that I use it on an extended daily basis. Some of the above are clearly dead. Some I still use lightly (Nginx, BBEdit) but are no longer the focal point of my work.

As far as Apple's Vision Pro, I have no clue if it will be successful. For myself personally, it is the first headset I am even interested in playing with.

seems like the longest thread is Windows by the same reasoning?

But not as a daily driver.

I have had one or more Macs since 1993, I went years without a Windows system. (Servers have been consistently Linux with some Unix and Macs early on).

I probably spent less than a day total with Windows for Work Groups, NT, 98,ME,Vista,7,8,11, etc

Much of my Windows 3 usage was under OS/2 Warp

The above list really about my personal major themes. I already can see major omissions, but Windows is not one.