Immersing Ourselves in AR, VR and XR Technologies. The Next Wave in Communications

Doug Downs (00:10):

Augmented and virtual reality have been around for a long time, and we've all heard many of the use cases. The hospice care patient who visited the Grand Canyon before she passed a therapy tool for people with hoarding disorder, training for medical students, learning how to perform procedures, even applications to help people overcome phobias like the fear of spiders. You've seen augmented reality in use. If you've ever watched sports on tv, that yellow line indicating the first down, that's ar. And if you or anyone has played Pokemon Go, well, obviously, but how do we use immersive technology like this to sell our brands? The Australian wine brand 19 Crimes is a perfect example. 19 crimes refers to the British prisoners who were sent to Australia instead of the gallows in the 18th century, they were supposed to have violated one of the infamous 19 crimes of the time, including clandestine marriage, bigamy, or stealing letters. When you buy the wine, there's an image of a former convict. You download the free mobile app, hold it up to the image, and the character suddenly animates explaining their side of the story.

19 Wines (01:42):

I've lived through toil and hardship punishment for leading a gang of thieves years at the labor factory, but I've paid my price.

Doug Downs (01:56):

It's a wonderful way to immerse people into a narrative around your brand, providing a richer experience.

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As a soldier, I fought for country as a rebel. I fought for cause. As a man, I fought for freedom. My name is James Wilson and I fight to the end.

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Today on Stories and Strategies, the University of Oregon has introduced the first master's program in immersive technologies, and its only available online helping us put the AR, VR, and even XR in PR.

(02:49):

My name is Doug Downs. Okay, music off the top walking theme, the Pokemon Gold song published by Niantic Inc. And the Pokemon Company, composed by Jun’ichi Masuda. A couple of thank yous off the top of the episode. James Jana left us a five star rating on Apple Podcasts in the United States. Thank you, James and Francesca Maisonave left us a comment on Spotify quote "from Puerto Rico's stunning shores. I appreciate your incredible podcast. It's been invaluable for my career. The quality of content, remarkable guests and perfect intros are truly amazing." Francesca gracias por decir esto, and for tolerating my clumsy Spanish. By the way, if you're listening on Spotify, you can leave a comment specific to any episode including this one. My guest today is Donna Davis joining today from Florida. Hi Donna.

Donna Davis (03:44):

Hello, Doug. Thanks so much for having me.

Doug Downs (03:46):

And you're in Gainesville, where are you at?

Donna Davis (03:49):

Well, today I'm in Orlando. Well, Winter Park Florida, but home is Portland, Oregon.

Doug Downs (03:56):

Right, right. Typically, but you're visiting family in Orlando, so

Donna Davis (04:00):

Nice,

Doug Downs (04:00):

Warm and sunny today. I'm sure.

Donna Davis (04:03):

It's stunning. It's very beautiful and very warm. I'm used to my cold, rainy fall. It's not going to complain.

Doug Downs (04:11):

Lots of that here for you. So we've got that covered, Donna, you're an associate professor and the director of the University of Oregon's Immersive Media Communication Master's program and the Oregon Reality Lab. You have your PhD in mass communication from the University of Florida where you studied relationship formation in three D immersive virtual environments. You have a master of science and Family, youth and Community Service and a BA in Journalism and Public relations, both also from the University of Florida. You are an inaugural faculty fellow for the School of Journalism and Communication, Agora Journalism Center for Innovation and Civic Engagement. And you've written several publications on virtual reality and social and economic impacts. We've provided a link to those in the show notes. Now, despite all that stuff, Donna,

Donna Davis (05:02):

Yes.

Doug Downs (05:02):

Let's go back to the high school or even middle school level and define first what immersive media means.

Donna Davis (05:11):

Okay. Immersive media represents all of the emerging technologies that all of us are using, whether we realize it or not. That can be using your cell phone, your smartphone for augmented reality. It could be using your laptop for gaming spaces. It could be your gaming console. It could be, we think of it as ar vr XR web three, AI alphabet soup there. But so a Meta Quest or HTC vibe, the VR headsets XR are the headsets like the Microsoft HoloLens. So where you can blend realities if you will. And in each of these realities or technologies, it's really almost like you're leaping into and immersing yourself in the screen, whichever screen it is that is in front of you.

Doug Downs (06:11):

And the idea is that I, as part of the audience, I feel more involved. There's parts of my brain that are not being fooled, but they're openly engaging with the activity that's going on.

Donna Davis (06:24):

Absolutely, absolutely. And there's all sorts of really wonderful research that talks about that ability for our brain to really take us there. It's being present in the experience in a way that I've watched so many people, I'll take them on an adventure in virtual reality in an VR headset. And when they take it off, it's always like, whoa, I'm in this world. Because to them, their brain was there.

Doug Downs (06:56):

They

Donna Davis (06:56):

Were completely immersed in that experience. So it's almost like where we're transporting ourselves into an experience through these emerging technologies. Some people would argue it's very Marshall McCluhan, that some people can be immersed in reading and words in text. And for some people that's probably more immersive because their brain creates this experience through words. So I don't want to let completely go of legacy media, but the focus in this program and immersive media are these technologies that transport us in a much more psychologically powerful way.

Doug Downs (07:40):

Now, is it fair to say that ar, VR XR hasn't quite caught on at the rate of adoption that we were once envisioning? And maybe there are a couple of things there. I've had experience with VR of most of it. Excellent. But at times you get that experience where you're on the roller coaster and I had to take the headset off. I was feeling nauseous. I was starting to feel, the other is it hasn't necessarily caught on at home because I don't have a headset at home.

Donna Davis (08:13):

I

Doug Downs (08:13):

Don't carry the headset. Right, right. Is it fair to say that the rate of adoption hasn't quite picked up the way we thought it might?

Donna Davis (08:20):

Totally fair to say, and I think that that's also, I mean, I've written with colleagues about this and that barrier to adoption at the level that we expect these days with emerging technologies that are social technologies. If you think about the size of platforms like TikTok and Facebook and Instagram and that adoption is worldwide in an enormous way, but that's because nearly everybody, the saturation level of a cell phone or again, a smartphone, these are things that you can really access out of a device that we all typically carry with us. So as a result of that, AR jumped right over VR in terms of mass adoption because, so you think about augmented reality, things like Snapchat or even now, there are a lot of marketers that are using AR like Ikea. You can house where you can download a piece of furniture that you think you might want.

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You can scan your room and then it'll dump that piece of furniture into your room so that you'll know exactly what it looks like in your space. So for those people who've bought something, brought it home and go and realized, oh my goodness, this is way too big for our space, or it's way too small for our space, now you can test it with augmented reality from your cell phone with a simple app, or you can try on glasses with Warby Parker and see exactly how they're going to look on your face without having to go anywhere. And so those kinds of uses of technology like augmented reality and Pokemon Go as you were playing the song,

(10:22):

We saw that go very, very viral back in, I guess it was 2018 or 19. That is augmented reality when it comes to virtual reality. Yes, the adoption has been much slower. And it's interesting because what it was two years, three years ago where one of the top words of the year was Metaverse and Facebook renamed, rebranded to Meta and was saying, VR is the future and we're all in. And so you can look at it through two lenses. One is we think of the adoption curve where the classic adoption curve that you've got the early adopters all the way through to the laggards, and it's a real nice bell curve, but then you throw in a hype cycle and it throws all of that off. What happens is we get the hype has been so big, was so big around the metaverse that it couldn't help but fall into what's known in the hype cycle as the trough of disillusionment.

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And that's where it is right now because it didn't match at the top of the hype cycle is the peak of inflated expectations. And that's what the media did was they created this incredible peak of inflated expectation that the market couldn't match. And when that happens, you fall into that trough. And it didn't happen for a number of reasons, is that the headsets are still very expensive for the average person. So you've got an automatic barrier to mass adoption simply by virtue of the cost. Then you also had people with motion sickness. I am one of those people that suffers really extreme motion sickness. I've been in labs where people will put me in a headset and say, well, try it, try it. And one was motion VR where they train race car drivers using virtual reality, put on a headset.

Doug Downs (12:29):

You're

Donna Davis (12:29):

Sitting in the chassis of the race car. They even put the gloves on you so you feel like you've got control of the wheel and your acceleration of brake is driven by you, and you're seeing it in the headset. I ripped that thing off my head before I got around the first curve and I thought I was going to get sick. And they said, okay, you are the person. We need to be able to get through this because if you can do it, anybody could do it. So that target of how do we get this right to get rid of that motion sickness has to happen. And you figure people who tried it early where they call it the screen door effect, where there's almost this layer of screen door between you and the reality, which throws our brains off, that causes a lot of that motion sickness,

Doug Downs (13:21):

And

Donna Davis (13:22):

They have made massive improvements on that. But if you were one of the people that tried it early and got really sick, you might say, I'm never going to try that again. So they got some people on that hype that they then may be permanently lost. And then you also have content. So what kind of content is out there? It's been limited other than the game spaces, content has been very slow to populate. It's costly for what has been up to now a pretty small audience, a niche audience. There's that combination of factors that have caused it to grow at a much slower rate than it was anticipated. And I would even point out that that slower rate is still very healthy. There is still very steady growth in the spaces, just not at the, we saw what happened with chat GBT and they experienced faster adoption than anything ever in history. It grew so quickly. So you've got technologies, again, anybody with a computer can get to it. And so mass, mass, mass adoption,

Doug Downs (14:45):

The hype cycle that you touched on at the beginning there, I think you might've just explained the cryptocurrency market to me, but that's a whole other episode that the hype and then the inevitable

Donna Davis (14:54):

Letdown.

Doug Downs (14:55):

It's not that it doesn't work, it's just, but anyway, with chat GPT though, really it's just a Google replacement. Instead of using Google, I use chat GPT, slightly different function. So I'm already familiar, or at least I think I am. I'm not really not a prompt engineer, so to speak with ar, vr, especially vr as you mentioned, the separation between the two. I am unfamiliar with this, so I do need something like a screen door to help my brain and to help me mentally acclimate to it.

Donna Davis (15:28):

I think media literacy is already such a problem for humanity, right? People have a really hard time understanding how to process everything that's coming at us in so many different ways that our brains can't keep up with the pace of change of technology in general. And certainly I think chat, GPT and AI are different in that you're right, people had a certain element of understanding already. Because if you've ever done use search, whichever platform you use, or spell check or grammar check or Alexa, these are all the devices that are in our world already that are AI that we are accustomed to. And the other really important piece is that chat, GPT is not only very easily accessible, it's also very intuitive, easy to use. Whereas with other technologies, if you're especially ar, not ar, but virtual reality, extended reality or blended reality, there tends to be more of a learning curve to understand how to use the technology. I mean, my happy playground where I've been studying communities for now almost 16 years, was second life, which we now think of as legacy media, if you will, in this space.

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It's still thriving. It's 20 years old and has a bigger base of people than it ever did before. It's a very profitable company. It meets all of those standards of success in just about every way you could imagine. Their limitation to broader adoption is complex, but one of them is that they're not, you can't access it on mobile. So you think about, again, how and why and to what effect do we use all of these devices and for what purpose? It's the mobile phone. If you could do it on a mobile and it's easy, you're going to hit way bigger numbers way faster. The more complex the technology is, the slower it will be to adoption. The more expensive it is, the slower it will be to adoption. But we're finding at a university level, we're having to really jump on AI because our students are already using it.

Doug Downs (18:15):

Yeah,

Donna Davis (18:15):

Absolutely. Right. So it's like as we think about, well golly, this is something new and I'm not sure I'm comfortable with it while the kids are running circles around us going, oh, but it's awesome. So I think all of these things, if you think about it, so much of this back in the day when X was Twitter or when Meta was Facebook, they went massive because the kids, it was high school and college kids that just flocked to it and it blew up. And from there, it spread out to the rest of us.

Doug Downs (18:53):

Your master's program, the University of Oregon,

Donna Davis (18:55):

Yes.

Doug Downs (18:56):

It's all virtual.

Donna Davis (18:57):

Yes.

Doug Downs (18:58):

Take me through what you're teaching. I was about to say the kids, the students, what are you teaching the students and how is this going to lead? Because ultimately part of your goal has to be to encourage faster adoption amongst folks like me.

Donna Davis (19:13):

Well, and we're super excited about this program because it's the first of its kind there. There's plenty of other programs out there that address all of these technologies, either from studying it from the psychological perspective like they do at Stanford and the engineering behind it. And there are a lot of great labs out there doing really great work and programs that are in the engineering schools that are building these technologies or computer science and game development programs where people are learning how to build content in these spaces. But we're really coming at it through that lens of strategic communication, that these are tools in our arsenal, if you will, that we can use to build community, build identity, build awareness, build advocacy. All of, if you think of all of those traditional goals that we have, whether it's in advertising, public relations, marketing, all of the things that we've used in the past have always been disruptive.

(20:18):

So I tell my kids, when I was an undergrad, my tools were a PICA ruler and a proportion wheel and hot wax and an Exacto knife that was even pre PageMaker, if you remember PageMaker and pre-internet. So when you think about it in that context of how rapidly all of these things have changed, and now with these new emerging technologies that are really immersive, what we hope to do with this program and with our students is help them become the strategists, the leaders in the field, the thinkers in the field that will go back and help organizations that are right now scratching their heads going, what is this and how do we use it? And why would we use it and who would we want in there? And there are some big brands that are already in full on, especially you look at game spaces like Roblox and how many brands are now in Roblox. It's astonishing and to great effect. There was a lot of buzz two years ago when Nike built Nike land in Roblox and the millions of visitors they had to in Roblox were outpacing the numbers in their stores.

Doug Downs (21:42):

Wow.

Donna Davis (21:43):

So you look at the way we've changed, the way we shop, the way we live, the way we play, the way we socialize. More people meet online to get married today than they do meet in old traditional ways. So we are looking at all of these technologies and trying to create the thought leaders of the future and the people that are going to be driving the strategy behind it so that I go back to hype cycle. There was so much press around this is going to be the next big thing and everybody's going to be there, and then oops, they weren't. So you see cases like the EU spending millions of dollars to create an anniversary experience in VR and six people showed up

Doug Downs (22:32):

It's going to take time, it's going to take some time. But with a course like this, it accelerates because it's a concentration of students focused on an agreed to outcome that this is a way to engage and enthrall more people. Absolutely. I applaud what you're doing. Thank you. Thank you so much for your time today, Donna. It's great to connect with you.

Donna Davis (22:55):

Likewise. And yeah, we're super excited about what's happening and we're already seeing our first cohort is astonishing in there from all four corners of the US and there chatting in our discussion boards in ways that is teaching me every day. It's very, very exciting.

Doug Downs (23:17):

That's awesome. Well enjoy the reality of the warm weather in Orlando.

Donna Davis (23:21):

Thank you so much.

Doug Downs (23:23):

If you'd like to send a message to my guest, Donna Davis, we've got a contact information on X in the show notes, as well as a couple of links to that university program. It's all virtual. Definitely worth having a look at. Stories and Strategies is a co-production of JGR Communications and Stories and Strategies podcasts. If you like this episode, do us a favor, immerse a friend in this podcast, share it with them, and please do leave a positive rating. Thanks for listening. Hang on.