The Hello. Hello and welcome to the future podcast. I'm your producer Greg Gunn and I have good news for you.

Chris recorded a special intro for this episode so you don't have to keep listening to me. Here's the man himself.

What do you think about when you hear the word virtual reality?

I think this has been part of the pop culture news entertainment cycle, but it seems

like it's farther away than it really is. There are cumbersome headsets that you have

to wear,

low fidelity images and poorly designed experiences.

So it's for this reason that I'm really excited to talk

to my next guest, who's all about virtual reality,

about what the promises are, and how to use this in different applications.

And I think especially during this time when we're all sheltering in place, self-quarantine,

that virtual reality starts to make a lot more sense.

I'm fascinated from the point of view of an educator that how VR can actually connect people

at great distances to experience things that they could not otherwise experience.

Take for example Jurassic Park, like that was an amazing fantasy to be able to be amongst the

dinosaurs, but now with VR tech you can actually do that. you can go from the very big like a dinosaur a giant t-Rex or

Actually zoom real down into the microscopic and see cells and things on an atomic level move about you and interact with them in ways

that you could never do before. So as an educator I'm super excited and if you go on

the opposite end of the spectrum where you look at VR depicted as a

dystopian future for example in the film Ready Player 1 the world has kind of

retreated into VR because real life is much worse than that. That people in abject poverty can

have actually have an experience as much richer and better than the reality

...