Virtual Childhood
By Mark Pesce

This morning you were speaking in terms of the potential uses of immersive technology to help young people learn more about themselves, and more about the world. Can you share your ideas about this?

A hundred years ago, Jean Piaget, a Swiss developmental psychologist, invented the field of developmental psychology by simply looking at his own children. What he learned was that children, to this point, have been thought of as being illogical and that they grew into logic as they matured. What he found is exactly the opposite, that children are actually ruthlessly logical from the moment that they can experience the universe. And what they do is they start by exploring the universe, and then they make some theories based on this exploration, and then they put these theories to the test. If they fail, they change. If not, they go on to another set of explorations. So, in fact, a child is as intent as any scientist in determining the nature of the real world.

So, in fact, a child is as intent as any scientist in determining the nature of the real world.

Given that, that means that the quality of childhood experience actually determines for the child what is real; what is true. It's not what a teacher says or what a parent says. It's what they actually experience for themselves. So, my supposition is that if we can produce a toy that can produce a kind of experience of the world, which is broader than what we might normally encounter, which would give them a different sense of the world, of the world's relationships, of its complexity, of its beauty, of its enormity; if all of those can be mixed together, then a child as they interact with the toy will start to first play with the toy, then experiment with the toy, and then start to build up certain understandings about the model of the world that this toy represents. And then they can start putting those into practice.

So, this can then become a laboratory for them to get a perception of the Earth just the same way as a child gets the perception of gravity when they're playing with blocks.

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