Decisions in the real world may be affected by experiences in a virtual one.
A series of tests conducted by Jeremy Bailenson, an assistant professor of communication at Stanford University, suggests that images seen in a computerized environment can have a lasting impact on the viewer.
For example, people who watched their avatars - digitized characters based on a person or thing - overeat and then gain weight are more likely to adopt a weight-loss plan in real life.
Participants in the Stanford study wore virtual reality helmets with light sensors on the back. A camera in each corner of the room tracked the movement of the light, causing the participants' motions in real life to move them around a virtual world.
Inside the digitized environment, people saw avatars of themselves in different situations.
In one study, one group saw their avatars just standing around, a second group saw their avatars running on the treadmill and a final group saw a different avatar running on a treadmill.
When questioned 24 hours later, the group members who saw themselves burning calories said they were far more motivated to work out, according to Jesse Fox, a second-year communications doctoral student at Stanford, who has been working with virtual reality since she started there.
Someday, virtual avatars could made available to a wider audience as a way of encouraging people to exercise, Fox said.
"You could put (your avatar) on your cellphone and then whip it out and see yourself on the treadmill," Fox said. "It could also be used to show how to properly perform excises at the gym."
In other experiments, avatars were modified to be skinnier, fatter or even older than their real-life counterparts.
Hal Ersner-Hershfield, a fifth-year physics graduate student at Standford, has been involved with the study for about a year and half.
His current experiment examines how interaction with an older version of one's avatar affects the amount of money a person is willing to save for the future.
In the virtual world, participants looked into a mirror and saw themselves as a different age. They were then asked hypothetical questions about saving for the future.
"Feeling more connecting to your future self might help people make better decisions," Ersner-Hershfield said. "People who saw the age-morphed version of themselves allocated significantly more hypothetical money toward retirement."
This technique may be used in further studies, such as showing smokers the consequence of their actions further down the road as way of convincing them to quit, Ersner-Hershfield said.
Virtual reality can also be used to help scientists study human interaction.
"These avatars have a lot to do with how we perceive other people and how they perceive us," said Kathryn Rickertsen, a Lincoln resident who worked as a research assistant on the project and will return to Stanford in August to pursue a doctoral in communications.
In one of the studies she helped with, participants were given avatars of varied height.
"By changing their height so they'd look down on another person, they'd approach that person closer and be more aggressive," she said. "Just by altering someone's virtual height, you could get them to act differently."
Behavior can also be altered by changing how attractive an avatar is.
"People that are displayed as physically attractive are more likely to get close to people," Rickertsen said. "People who are less attractive are less talkative."
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