Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps

it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream

van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds,

music, radio, podcasts. Hello, you're listening to the Arts and Ideas podcast.

I'm Heta Howes, and this edition is part of our series New Thinking,

looking at new research in UK universities.

Today's episode marks International Women's Day,

and to help us celebrate the incredible work women are doing across the UK, we have two very special guests joining us.

Sylvia Pan, who is a lecturer in virtual reality at Goldsmiths and Sarah Ellis, who is a director of digital development at the Royal Shakespeare Company.

And no spoilers, but we'll be hearing all about their brand new hot-off-the-press collaboration

for the Arts and Humanities Research Council later in this episode.

So take a moment, get your virtual reality headsets at the ready,

and prepare to immerse yourselves in what sounds to me like the perfect partnership between arts and technology.

So VR may still sound a bit like sci-fi to some people, including I confess myself. So where might we encounter VR in our day-to-day lives?

Well, it depends on what kind of access you have to devices. I would say hopefully in five or 10

years down the line, I would expect everybody would have a VR device or a kind of mixed reality device at home where they can adapt into either VR, which is fully immersive, or AR, which is a see-through display.

So hopefully we'll all have access to devices like that in the next five to 10 years.

But the kind of application that those devices could give us range from, you know, social skill trainings, medical therapy for mental health disorders, as well as entertainment and also remote working.

So for instance, that is probably a topic that's super relevant in the era of coronavirus.

So lots of people in China have been working from home lately.

So basically, that is a device that connects you with other people that you can't physically be with

or take you to a different place, which either you can't physically be or it just doesn't exist in the real world.

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