A virtual reality headset already provides us entertainment: We can experience the excitement of a roller coaster ride from the comfort of our homes or do the dizzying climb up Mt. Everest without the freezing cold, heavy gear, or grueling travel. NYU Abu Dhabi’s visionaries, like Aaron Kaufman, are starting to explore the use of virtual reality for science, to expand their research capabilities that would typically be limited to a lab setting or not be possible at all.
“There are many types of experiments that we can't do in the professor’s lab for either infrastructural or geographical reasons,” said Kaufman, Associate Professor of Political Science, NYUAD. “We have a collaboration on campus with professors in the engineering division, the arts and humanities division, and the social science division, where we're trying to study how we can use these virtual reality tools, VR headsets, and immersive virtual reality rooms, to build behavioral simulations. We can put people in a VR headset and have them experience things that are impossible to experience in a professor's lab or even in the real world. And we can use this to expand the scope of the types of things we can study.”
For instance, Kaufman has worked on a study to build empathy towards stray dogs in the Middle East by simulating a virtual tour of a dog shelter.
“Instead of taking people to the stray dog center in the middle of the desert or sticking them in a computer lab and making them watch a video, we can put them in a VR headset and give them the virtual experience of touring this dog shelter and seeing what it's like from the safety of the lab,” Kaufman said. “If something like this works, you know you have both a more powerful intervention and something that gets more people empathetic towards stray dogs, then maybe it works in other cases where it's tough to build empathy, but it's also impractical to give people the full experience you'd like them to have.”
To make this possible, Kaufman is working with NYUAD’s Mohamad Eid, an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, a virtual space design genius and the go-to person for hardware support, and Scandar Copti, Associate Arts Professor of Film, who produces immersive documentaries.
“There aren't a lot of places in the world that would be able to support this kind of research,” Kaufman said. “NYUAD is really open to people who want to come up with new ways of doing things.”
Kaufman has been at NYUAD for six years. He’s quick to celebrate his talented and motivated undergraduates.
“In the six years I've been here, I think every year one of my students has gone on to a top PhD program. And that's really, really cool. Not a lot of professors anywhere in the world can say that every year they send a student to a top PhD program,” Kaufman said.
Overall, Kaufman's passion lies in exploring the fundamental questions of how we know what we know and how we can establish knowledge in the social sciences. His work aims to develop innovative tools and approaches that can advance our understanding of human behavior and social phenomena.
