Transcending Time and Space in Virtual Reality - Creative Approaches to Persuasive Communication

Immersive virtual environments, popularly known as virtual reality (VR), provides users with visceral, sensory-rich simulations that mimic firsthand experience. Despite the realism, VR also allows users to overcome the constraints of time and space we have in the physical world. How do these contradicting features of VR allow us to creatively approach traditional challenges of persuasion? I discuss how virtual experiences can change the way we think and behave in the physical world, even after users remove the headset.

Speaker

• SUN JOO (GRACE) AHN University of Georgia (UGA), Associate Professor

Sun Joo (Grace) Ahn (Ph.D., Stanford University) is an Associate Professor at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at University of Georgia. She is the founding director of the Games and Virtual Environments Lab (https://www.ugavr.com). Her main program of research investigates how interactive and immersive digital media such as virtual and augmented reality transform traditional rules of communication and social interactions, looking at how virtual experiences shape the way that people think, feel, and behave in the physical world.