Virtual Reality Dissonance

[Mystify]

Say you have an adequate VR system working, and have created your virtual world. You have even created a good online multiplayer component, so you can interact with other people. The assumption people will make is that they are perceiving the same world as everyone else.
But what if they aren't?
There is no reason why the world presented to each person can't vary to an arbitrary degree. This has many potential uses. In another thread someone said that a VR teacher who makes eye contact with the user will allow the user to retain the information better. There is no reason why the teacher can't be making eye contact with every student at the same time. This could be combined with shifting the teacher's attention to another student if directly addressing them, such as when answering a question, This could also be used to play mind games with the players in a game. Make it so the body language of a NPC is rather shifty for one player, to seed distrust, while keeping them appearing normal for the other users. Or to a larger degree, change the appearance of objects. One person sees a tin can, another sees a golden goblet. Used properly, such differences could have a great effect.

[snorelab]

Make it so the body language of a NPC is rather shifty for one player, to seed distrust, while keeping them appearing normal for the other users.

What a great idea. This would be excellent for group problem solving exercises that were meant to pose interpersonal challenges. There were studies a few decades back about the attractiveness of teachers and students and how they perceived each other's ability as a student or teacher. Spoiler alert: The more attractive you are perceived, the higher your rating. So relative attractiveness could be altered as well. As well as external identifiers that we tie to our identity like eye color, skin color, height, etc.

All of those great social and psychological experiments we used to do on people in the past we can now do on each other in VR!!!!

[rmcclelland]

The book "Infinite Realities" explorers these issues in great detail, including references to the studies.