Students listened to lectures given by:

• Jim Blascovich (psychology professor, UCSB) on Virtual Reality in the Social Sciences and the history of VR
• Jeremy Bailenson (communication professor) on Transformed Social Interaction and Experimental Design in Social Sciences
• Clifford Nass (communication professor) on VR and possibilities for applications in the third world
• James Fishkin (communiation professor) on deliberative democracy and possibilites for VR
• Shanto Iyengar ( communication professor) on the KNET project
• Hunter Gehlbach (education post-doctoral fellow) on learning and VR
• Nick Yee on Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Games
• Andy Beall (owner of Vizard Virtual Reality Software) on 3D visualization and the implimentation of VR worlds

The following information is an excerpt from Professor Jim Blascovich's lecture on Virtual Reality and Social Sciences

Why do we use virtual reality for social science research?

• It sheds light on low level processes that are automatic
• Social science experiments require people to be immersed in a scene. This could be easily replicated in the virtual world

Current fields in psychology that use virtual reality are:

• Visual Perception
• Spatial Cognition
• Education and Training
• Social Psychology

Some cases where "virtual" worlds were used in creating social science experiments. Neurologically immersive virtual reality worlds have been used without what is traditionally thought of as "virtual":

• Zimbardo's prison experiment
• Stanley Milgram's obedience tests

Immersive virtual worlds do not need to be created. However, virtual reality worlds offer the same tactile, visual and kinesthetic feedback as psychology studies with confederates and contrived situations. While correlational experiments suffer from inferrential problems, experimental studies can prove causation between variables in a study. Virtual Reality also offers some advantages like:

• Mundane Realism
• Ease of Tracking
• Repeatablity
• Use of Avatars instead of confederates