66 OPINION
Over the top
Words by Neal Romanek Don’t like virtual reality? Tough, you’re already living in it. IT’S VR ALL THE WAY DOWN
his issue features FEED’s VR Deep Dive and we learned that the technology for immersive content and the artists using it
beginning of the Internet. Or perhaps we’ve been practising for it since the beginning of television. Or radio? Or reading and writing? Perhaps there’s something in humans that craves living in a virtual, self-created world – and where we find ourselves now is just a logical progression that started long ago with cave paintings and hallucinogenic mushrooms. So if someone asks you if you’ve ever tried virtual reality, the answer is, yes, of course you have. You spend most of your life in it. 3D goggles? Choose your own adventure VR storytelling? 360 live streams of sporting events? These might all be varieties of virtual reality content coming to a headset near you soon, but in the meantime, so is posting on Facebook, swiping through Tinder, interacting on Twitch with your favourite influencer – they’re all virtual reality. It’s virtual reality all the way down. Now how are you going to live in it? Only the most glassy-eyed futurist would deny that our virtual future is a bit scary. We are constructing a parallel universe after all – and making it up as we go along. But the virtual world is filled with opportunities for communication, inspiration, education – enlightenment even. To keep it from turning real dystopian, real fast, we’re going to need honest discussions, deep thinking, open and caring communities. We’re going to need good regulations and responsible technologists. We’ve already seen how bad actors can use our immersion in the virtual reality to our detriment, manipulating information and public opinion with fairly simple tools, selling products and ideas we don’t need, concentrating power in the hands of a few rather than the many. Our challenge is to make the new virtual reality a dimension that improves what we do in the physical space and in the most important space of all – our own personal inner reality. But it will require a lot of honesty, with ourselves and with each other, and a clear admission of where we already are. We gave birth to this brave new world, it’s our responsibility to help it grow up.
are maturing quickly. But there are plenty of people who are convinced that virtual reality is over – or at least far from being at a level where companies need to make serious decisions about it. I have bad news for them. We are already living in virtual reality. I don’t mean our lives are a synthetic simulation, à la The Matrix (although there does exist a fringe group of cosmologists who claim this might not be far from the truth). What I do mean is that the vast part of our brain’s activity is based on the input of a computer simulation, that huge proportions of our thoughts, feelings, decisions, plans – what we see and hear – are predicated entirely on what we perceive through an audiovisual interface. A 2016 Nielsen report showed that on average Americans spend about ten hours a day on screens. That includes computers, mobile devices, TVs. We can assume that those in the workforce, especially you who sit at desks, might spend substantially longer. The use of VR headsets wasn’t mentioned in the report, but assumedly the number was too small to be of significance. It would be hard to argue that much of those ten hours’ was clocked in the unadulterated ‘real world’. And even when we put down our screens, we obey the satnav’s directions, or maybe listen to a podcast, while our smart watches or fitness devices count our steps or check our heart rate, and we might ask Alexa or another connected device to reach into the web and retrieve something for us. Even when we’re seemingly unhooked from the digital universe – say we’re in the pool, swimming laps – how much of our thought life, our plans, concerns, memories, are based not on what we have directly experienced, but on what we have learned through our interfaces with the virtual. Are we thinking about that email we received, or the next tweet we’re doing to send? Are we remembering the graphics in the report we read? Are we itching to get back home
OUR VR HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR A LONG TIME to binge-watch season three? Is it too radical to say that our physical lives are just the interstitial glue that hold our virtual lives in place, that they are spaces for us to recharge, before we step back into the mainstream of our lives, which is the virtual reality? Do our real lives now to take place more in the virtual space with our physical life simply a waiting room? VR enthusiasts promise there will be seamless integration of digitally generated reality and physical reality very soon. Through special contact lenses and bone conduction sound equipment we will experience perpetual access to our networks. When we hear these predictions, it’s easy to be tricked into believing that a fully immersive virtual reality is a years – possibly decades – away. But our virtual reality has been going on for a long time. You might date it from the
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