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I've heard that professor speak in EE380 at Stanford. The VR lab at Stanford isn't in the CS department; it belongs to the "communications" (marketing, PR) department. They have some scary results:

They have a VR simulation of swimming with dolphins. They let little kids try it. Then a few months later, they ask the kids about their experience of swimming with dolphins. A sizable fraction think it really happened, and add details as if it were real. It's possible to use VR to implant false memories.

They have the capability of mapping one face onto the video image of another person, and can construct, using morphing software, combinations of two faces. They've discovered that, if they construct a face which is weighted 1/3 or so of the subject's face and 2/3 of some politician's face, and play a campaign speech, people still recognize the politician but agree with them much more. Coming soon to an ad near you.

[1] https://vhil.stanford.edu

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False memories are fairly easy to plant in many people. It's possible to plant them just by repeatedly asking someone about something that didn't happen:

https://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm

Also this:

> “Our findings show that false memories of committing crime with police contact can be surprisingly easy to generate, and can have all the same kinds of complex details as real memories,” says psychological scientist and lead researcher Julia Shaw of the University of Bedfordshire in the UK.

> “All participants need to generate a richly detailed false memory is 3 hours in a friendly interview environment, where the interviewer introduces a few wrong details and uses poor memory-retrieval techniques.”

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/...

i've made up memories spontaneously and was in total disbelief until proven wrong.

Are you sure? I think you're misremembering.

"Gaslighting" is the popular term for this.

It's something commonly done accidentally by parents, where a parent will insist a child's version of events is incorrect because the parent remembers it differently, until the child's memory is replaced with the parent's narrative.

Side-note: people don't tend to realize that this is what the antagonist in the Star Trek TNG episode "Chain of Command" is trying to accomplish. He's not trying to make Picard "submit" by saying something he doesn't believe; he's trying to make Picard really, actually believe that there are five lights. (And in the end—despite Picard's insistence otherwise—he does.)

I was in Jeremy's lab as an undergrad and master's student. There was a team of student RA's which was from the communications department and a team of student programmers who were CS, EE and Symbolic Systems. Many of the grad students were also in technical fields.

Probably the scariest stuff, phenomenologically to me at least, is the gaze studies. Human gaze can be manipulated in VR to create very scary perceptions, avatars and agents can be made to seem as if they are staring at you unblinkingly and following your gaze whereever you are going, etc etc. Isopraxis, which is important to persuasion, can be done trivially and perfectly (that is, noisily), and social space manipulated also trivially.

> It's possible to use VR to implant false memories.

What's even scarier is that it's possible to use traditional advertising to implant false memories.

http://www.wired.com/2011/05/ads-implant-false-memories/

I don't think it's usually part of the debate, but IMO it actually makes a lot of sense to justify ad-blocking as a mental-security measure, especially as more and more advertisers are deliberately setting out to try to hack your brain in a way that does not involve your conscious mind.

Here's the paper on the combination of faces and political influence. https://vhil.stanford.edu/pubs/2008/bailenson-facial-similar...

>Abstract: Social science research demonstrates that people are drawn to others perceived as similar. We extend this finding to political candi- dates by comparing the relative effects of candidate familiarity as well as partisan, issue, gender, and facial similarity on voters’ evaluations of candidates. In Experiment 1, during the week of the 2006 Florida gubernatorial race, a national representative sample of voters viewed images of two unfamiliar candidates (Crist and Davis) morphed with either themselves or other voters. Results demonstrated a strong prefer- ence for facially similar candidates, despite no conscious awareness of the similarity manipulation. In Experiment 2, one week before the 2004 presidential election, a national representative sample of voters evaluated familiar candidates (Bush and Kerry). Strong partisans were unmoved by the facial similarity manipulation, but weak partisans and independents preferred the candidate with whom their own face had been morphed over the candidate morphed with another voter. In Experiment 3, we compared the effects of policy similarity and facial similarity using a set of prospec- tive 2008 presidential candidates. Even though the effects of party and policy similarity dominated, facial similarity proved a significant cue for unfamiliar candidates. Thus, the evidence across the three studies sug- gests that even in high-profile elections, voters prefer candidates high in facial similarity, but most strongly with unfamiliar candidates.

> It's possible to use VR to implant false memories.

Prove to me that is not happening to you this moment. ;)

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