Ever wanted to change your age through the flip of a switch? What would it feel like being young again or experiencing being older before coming back to reality? This is possible in Virtual Reality and this is what we will explore here.

I choose to separate life in 5 main stages:

1. Childhood
2. Teenage years
3. Young adult
4. Middle-aged 
adult
5. Senior 
adult

Now, depending on you current age, by living different age scenarios in Virtual Reality, you are going to get different insights and benefits. You would either:

• Experience completely new situations (if you are a child)
• Relive situations that you have lived in the past but have moved on from since (if you are a senior citizen)
• Experience a mix or new and already lived situations (all other ages)

In Virtual Reality, you could be put through various situations, that can either be crafted specifically for an “offline” experience or for an “online” one.

An offline experience means that a story and characters would be created by a team of developers or a creatives and you would simply go through the story and interact with computer controlled characters.

An online experience would put you in a world populated by other “real” people, that would, like you, get a virtual representation (an Avatar) of themselves to interact in the virtual world. This setup doesn’t require a specific scenario to be crafted and situations would arise depending on you interacting with other “human” Avatars in the virtual world.

The offline experience has the advantage to confront you with specifically crafted situations that will force you to make typical decisions of a person of that age, that will bring more empathy for that person to you. The disadvantage is that it requires potentially significant efforts to craft a deep mind changing experience.

The online experience has the advantage that it doesn’t require as much effort to put together. You only need an online world, like Second Life to interact with other people and such worlds already exist. The disadvantage is that it relies on other people being convinced that the age of your Avatar is your real age in the physical world and generally won’t offer as strong an experience as a hand crafted offline one would.

Note that these experiences are already available in virtual worlds today, however without the total immersion that a Virtual Reality system (headset, body tracking, etc.) offers so the experience is lessened. But they can give you an idea of the impact the full VR experience can have on you in terms of empathy and also better understanding yourself.

In summary, changing your age and experiencing situations that are typical of that age can give you life perspectives that can greatly enhance your ability for empathy. Doing the mental exercise of putting yourself in the mind of a child already brings benefits that you can experience now, so imagine the impact “living” the experience of being a child can have! All this in a virtual environment where you can easily live the experience for as long as you want, at low costs and without any social downside to you. In this case, a mix of offline and online experiences should provide a good balance of experiences and the greatest benefits.

In the next post, we are going to explore changing professions.