The room shuddered, and Mark Zuckerberg looked down. The floor was opening, leaving him perched on a narrow ledge, a thin plank ahead, a gaping pit on either side. “OK, that’s pretty scary”, he said. It was also pretty imaginary, for the Facebook founder stood in a Stanford University lab, video goggles strapped to his head, atmospheric audio pumped in, the ground rigged to quaver. Many of those who experience the Stanford “pit”, as Zuckerberg did in 2014, are too frightened to walk the plank. And that is the marvel of virtual reality: when gadgets envelop our senses, we enter a limbo state where our minds understand the falsity but our bodies do not.
Virtual reality – and much breathless exaggeration regarding it – has been part of tech daydreaming for a few decades, without yet becoming something anyone might keep in their living room. During a previous flare of VR hopes in the 1980s and 90s, microprocessors lagged behind programmers’ visions. Today, computing power has nearly caught up, and it is up to coders to conjure dreamscapes desirable enough for us to buy. Once VR goes mainstream, optimists say, new universes will open. We’ll be able to fly. Or become trout. Or walk through others’ bodies. Any kookiness or fantasia could be concocted and shared. Pessimists, however, warn that VR will produce aimless addicts, lost in non-existent worlds to the detriment of the one we have contended with for millennia.
Whether VR proves grand or ghastly, tech corporations are hurrying to profit. Months after Zuckerberg wavered at the pit’s edge, Facebook paid $2 billion for a leading headset maker, Oculus VR. Also that year, Google released a viewer made of cardboard that allowed users to transform their smartphones into rudimentary VR screens. In the years since, the Samsung Gear VR has come out, along with the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, and the Sony PlayStation VR. None has sold in society-changing numbers, but each product inches ahead.
In the meantime, entrepreneurs are feverishly developing apps, promising VR fitness, VR movie experiences, VR property viewing, VR psychotherapy, not to mention VR porn. A pioneering spirit flourishes, thrilling and chaotic. “Consumer VR is coming like a freight train”, writes Jeremy Bailenson, the Stanford professor behind the pit and one of the world’s leading VR researchers, in Experience on Demand: What virtual reality is, how it works, and what it can do. “It may take two years, it may take ten, but mass adoption of affordable and powerful VR technology, combined with vigorous investment in content, is going to unleash a torrent of applications that will touch every aspect of our lives.”
For Bailenson, the power of virtual reality is that it is not virtual. What you do in VR generates experiences akin to real ones, he argues, making VR the most psychologically powerful medium ever invented. Once the technology is refined (major limitations remain), VR will transform education, whether one is learning brain surgery or parachuting. It will allow us to travel anywhere in perfect safety. It could even deepen our empathy. Storytelling has long offered humans a way to glimpse others’ viewpoints, witness their escapades and their torments, too. But VR, its advocates say, would be far more potent. You could inhabit the body of, say, someone from a different country or ethnicity, or discover what it is to be a cow, Bailenson suggests. Another use of VR “presence” is real-world absence, which has been used to help burn victims through a game called SnowWorld, which distracts them from excruciating medical treatment. News organizations, too, are experimenting, hoping VR will engage the public in far-flung events when words, photographs and video fail.
The revolution is approaching at a peculiar time, when fear of what is becoming of us in the digital age cohabits with excitement about each new wizardry – these conflicting emotions often occurring in the same person at the same time. Our unease is evident in an array of recent books, amounting almost to a new genre: dystopian non-fiction. Consider the subtitles of a few from 2017: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon cornered culture and undermined democracy; The rise of Silicon Valley as a political powerhouse and social wrecking ball; The existential threat of big tech. Even Wired magazine, a longtime purveyor of our glittering digital future, now regularly asks where it all went wrong.
Bailenson is a hearty VR booster, but acknowledges a few concerns. If a VR experience is almost equal to a real one, what happens when you witness VR violence there? What if you yourself murder someone in a VR game? From the outside, it would merely look like a person in headset and earphones. Inside, something hideous could be happening. Legal questions arise, too. Should crimes committed in VR be illegal? Before you say no, what about torture? Or sex crimes? What if the user has sexual relations with a VR version of a real person without their permission? This seems obscene. But is it a thought crime? An experience crime? Or no crime at all?
Virtual reality – and much breathless exaggeration regarding it – has been part of tech daydreaming for a few decades, without yet becoming something anyone might keep in their living room. During a previous flare of VR hopes in the 1980s and 90s, microprocessors lagged behind programmers’ visions. Today, computing power has nearly caught up, and it is up to coders to conjure dreamscapes desirable enough for us to buy. Once VR goes mainstream, optimists say, new universes will open. We’ll be able to fly. Or become trout. Or walk through others’ bodies. Any kookiness or fantasia could be concocted and shared. Pessimists, however, warn that VR will produce aimless addicts, lost in non-existent worlds to the detriment of the one we have contended with for millennia.Whether VR proves grand or ghastly, tech corporations are hurrying to profit. Months after Zuckerberg wavered at the pit’s edge, Facebook paid $2 billion for a leading headset maker, Oculus VR. Also that year, Google released a viewer made of cardboard that allowed users to transform their smartphones into rudimentary VR screens. In the years since, the Samsung Gear VR has come out, along with the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, and the Sony PlayStation VR. None has sold in society-changing numbers, but each product inches ahead.
In the meantime, entrepreneurs are feverishly developing apps, promising VR fitness, VR movie experiences, VR property viewing, VR psychotherapy, not to mention VR porn. A pioneering spirit flourishes, thrilling and chaotic. “Consumer VR is coming like a freight train”, writes Jeremy Bailenson, the Stanford professor behind the pit and one of the world’s leading VR researchers, in Experience on Demand: What virtual reality is, how it works, and what it can do. “It may take two years, it may take ten, but mass adoption of affordable and powerful VR technology, combined with vigorous investment in content, is going to unleash a torrent of applications that will touch every aspect of our lives.”
For Bailenson, the power of virtual reality is that it is not virtual. What you do in VR generates experiences akin to real ones, he argues, making VR the most psychologically powerful medium ever invented. Once the technology is refined (major limitations remain), VR will transform education, whether one is learning brain surgery or parachuting. It will allow us to travel anywhere in perfect safety. It could even deepen our empathy. Storytelling has long offered humans a way to glimpse others’ viewpoints, witness their escapades and their torments, too. But VR, its advocates say, would be far more potent. You could inhabit the body of, say, someone from a different country or ethnicity, or discover what it is to be a cow, Bailenson suggests. Another use of VR “presence” is real-world absence, which has been used to help burn victims through a game called SnowWorld, which distracts them from excruciating medical treatment. News organizations, too, are experimenting, hoping VR will engage the public in far-flung events when words, photographs and video fail.
The revolution is approaching at a peculiar time, when fear of what is becoming of us in the digital age cohabits with excitement about each new wizardry – these conflicting emotions often occurring in the same person at the same time. Our unease is evident in an array of recent books, amounting almost to a new genre: dystopian non-fiction. Consider the subtitles of a few from 2017: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon cornered culture and undermined democracy; The rise of Silicon Valley as a political powerhouse and social wrecking ball; The existential threat of big tech. Even Wired magazine, a longtime purveyor of our glittering digital future, now regularly asks where it all went wrong.
Bailenson is a hearty VR booster, but acknowledges a few concerns. If a VR experience is almost equal to a real one, what happens when you witness VR violence there? What if you yourself murder someone in a VR game? From the outside, it would merely look like a person in headset and earphones. Inside, something hideous could be happening. Legal questions arise, too. Should crimes committed in VR be illegal? Before you say no, what about torture? Or sex crimes? What if the user has sexual relations with a VR version of a real person without their permission? This seems obscene. But is it a thought crime? An experience crime? Or no crime at all?
by Tom Rachman, TLS | Read more:
Image: Ready Player One, Lifestyle Pictures/Alamy
