Werner Herzog Talks Virtual Reality | Hacker News Reader

Werner Herzog Talks Virtual Reality

newyorker.com

23 pointsrileyjshaw3 comments

He seems to be as completely baffled by the possibilities of virtual reality as the rest of us are. The most interesting thing I mined out of this conversation is Herzog's feeling that life already is a virtual reality. As I now turn my head from left to right and see the tables and objects around this room I suddenly feel the unreality of lived existence. Now I imagine wearing a virtual reality helmet, playing a simulation of a person, who then puts on a virtual reality helmet and proceeds to load up a similar game himself, and so on, ad infinitum, as I fall into a fractal abyss of perception/experience/unreality. I pop the helmet off in a panic and suddenly realize that I'm back in the game, but this time the game's main hardware is my head itself. I'm anxious but excited for what will emerge from the VR and AR revolution.

Look at how the image is blurred at the edges. It's a virtual reality and not a very good one, at that.

The reason you and others feel the unreality of reality is likely the excessive exposure to media and the facade of unrealities presented to us as "reality"

News is crafted more like entertainment rather than investigating facts. The trend with cinema seems to be realism of fantasy and fiction. Reality TV is presented to us as if it were documenting "Reality" when it's actually a team of writers and producers carefully designing a planned narrative.

We sit at computers reading social media posts of friends and strangers presenting their own selective narratives to their "life" which is more or less a facade that omits the mundane or "real" aspects that we would encounter and be aware of were we not all so far removed and isolated by otherwise anonymous apartment complexes, neighborhoods, and (sub)urban typologies.

Personally, I would not desire any sort of luddite reversion of technology and entertainment. I do believe there is a concerning trend of detachment from reality born out of cultural habits, that is largely derived from mass media.

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