Dr. Jason Jerald will be speaking at the panel Suspension of Disbelief in Virtual Reality at SXSWi. He will cover what is most interesting about virtual reality and augmented reality: its potential.

Virtual reality is about transcending time and space by going other places and seeing and feeling other things that are wholly outside the realm of the limitations of the hear and now. More than that, it also might afford an ability to move beyond our physical limitations as well, transforming ourselves into new people or things.

When thinking about what this technology could do, the most intriguing aspect of it is education. Jerald is working on bringing this new method of transportation of the mind to the classroom. With his program, the students quickly learned the functions of the various parts  of the human brain in a VR simulation by being transported into the brain itself.

“Taking the hands with a head-mounted display, you can reach into the world and grab different brain parts like an anatomy puzzle from biology class,” Jerald said. “With virtual reality, you can get immediate feedback of what this object does. This was a pilot study with kids grades three through five. The kids were able to understand in three or four minutes what the different parts of the brain did.”

For a simpler experience, augmented reality might prove useful for education.

“There are simple devices like an iPad or handheld as I like to call it,” Jerald said. “Because we are tracking where that camera is in real-world space, we can overlay geometry or information through the screen onto the real world.”

Imagine you’re on your honeymoon to New Zealand, and you’re walking the pathways of Meduseld the great Hall of the Rohirrim. Only instead of a hill in the middle of a valley, the structure is projecting on your screen and you can see where everything would have been during the making of the film.

Then, on a field trip, your child might hold up their class-issued iPad and see over the skyline in Washington, D.C., what the city looked like during the Civil War.

Then there is the idea of you being a different person—feeling and seeing what they see.

“There’s something we call embodiment,” Jerald said. “Right now in most demos, if you look down, you’re a floating point in space. If you add your own body, that really adds a sense of presence—especially if there are tactile sensations that complement the visual stimulation. Even if it’s a different color skin or type of body, you are suddenly in that world like it’s you. That can affect things like empathy. You can understand what it’s like to be in a different gender, race, or body type. The potential for learning with empathy is huge.”

Understanding how the brain works is a huge part of VR and AR.  To perceive things that are not real as something that is real is very difficult.

“There is something called the uncanny value,” Jerald said. “We get better and better at portraying humans in the virtual world. This is difficult because our brains are attuned to faces. We are very sensitive to something that might be off in the face. If you have a cartoon character you’re easily fooled. As we get to portraying people more realistically it gets more, and more difficult.”

This technology has come a long way in the last few years, but full acceptance and other factors keep it from moving forward more quickly. The idea here is potential. This technology has so much it can offer us, particularly a means to learn more than who we are, and thereby transcend reality.