Virtual embodiment challenges our understanding of who and what we are
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Even using very crude hardware, it is difficult to convey how profound I have found some of my experiences. Take a simple setup that lets you see yourself in the third person for instance. Logically you know that the person standing there is you. You can reach out and feel the world about you, walk about and feel yourself bump into walls. And yet there's also a disconnect. Almost a numbing. I find that my mind often switches between feeling that I am in my head and feeling that I am behind the camera. And this leads to a feeling that I are nowhere. That this is not reality.
Take off the headset, and now reality itself feels broken. Your perspective and sense of your body indescribably off. Sometimes the effect lasts just a few seconds, other times it lasts the entire rest of the day
As silly as they are, my experiments with VR headsets and cameras have genuinely changed my understanding of myself and of the world. I don't understand why people are not more excited / freaked out about the possibilities this technology offers. Maybe it doesn't effect everyone in the same way
Anyways, if nothing else, the article gave me a few new ideas for areas to explore
[0]: https://blog.mattbierner.com/series/modded_reality/ (just as heads up: a few posts are nsfw and most are way too long)
I've owned a Rift DK1, Rift DK2, Gear VR, and Vive. I am a VR enthusiast. As profound as the experiences with VR are, after 500 hrs in each generation of headset I find myself bumping up with the hardware and network limitations. I'll apply for the first company to offer digital office space, and I'll sell my monitors once I can read bash for 3 hours straight as comfortably in VR as I can in flatland. We are just a long ways away on a lot of different technological boundaries. I'm not freaking out because it doesn't feel like we are almost there. It feels like we need a new wireless communication protocol, improved battery weight, better displays, more powerful GPUs, better software UX, better inputs, etc. etc.
> Take off the headset, and now reality itself feels broken. Your perspective and sense of your body indescribably off. Sometimes the effect lasts just a few seconds, other times it lasts the entire rest of the day
For me the only "broken reality" aspect of popping in and out is if my digital of physical body isn't where I expect it. The feeling never lasts more than 3 seconds, and it's more jarring than anything. I wonder if it's an age thing. My first HMD was a Virtual Boy when I was still very young.
So instead of VR, I’ve focused on exploring alternate experiences of reality. And these experiences somehow never feel broken, even when they clearly are. Last fall for example, I brought a pair of oversized eyeballs that wirelessly stream video to a headset to a maker faire. The eyeballs worked great in my apartment but wireless difficulties on site caused latency spikes of over 1 second. Imagine: a full second between you moving one of the eyeballs and your view updating. Horrible. That would never fly for VR but people seemed to love this setup even with the delay. In a way, the delay became part of the new reality that the device presented.
And this is what excites me: the possibility of exploring new realities, realities beyond normal human experience. Not just fantasy worlds, but entirely new ways of being and sensing and understanding (the example I keep returning to is synesthesia). Truly being able to realize that vision is a long way out but current tech let’s us get the slightest of glimpses at what this future could hold. And this is what scares me: that the new realities we create will be reflections of us as we are today
I ran this story through Hemingway-App to get some stats:
"77 adverbs. Aim for 26 or fewer.
37 uses of passive voice, meeting the goal of 88 or fewer.
8 phrases have simpler alternatives.
52 of 439 sentences are hard to read.
70 of 439 sentences are very hard to read."
In the V.R. game Surgeon Simulator, players use power drills, bone saws, and other tools to vivisect a humanoid alien that writhes in pain on the operating table. As in most V.R. video games, players in Kitchen and Surgeon Simulator move in fanciful ways and are, at best, semi-embodied.
In this case the verbiage seems like a cover for ignorance of the subject matter.
Pardon? This is totally not true. Did the author even see the game? I stopped reading after this.
Does this mean that they for some reason start counting at zero, or is this article freely available? I really don't get it.
edit: After a reload it now says:
You are viewing article 1 of 4 free articles this month.
i also avoid clicking these links, even if i know i probably won't reach paywall limit that month.. its psychological :)
i like the Guardian model better, no paywall. now considering a paid subscription out of sheer appreciation for that
I've been waiting for this. I expect claims like this to fuel anti-VR hysteria if it catches on in a significant way, especially if adolescents seem to like it. It's a poorly thought out intuitive 'understanding' that has nothing of substance behind it. If you want to compare VR to something, compare it to acting in a play.
Consider the experience of acting in a play, say one with a violent scene. You experience it bodily. With full fidelity and total realism. Your victim is a living, breathing human being who has a family, hopes, dreams, can feel pain, etc. And yet you raise the pistol, one which retorts loud enough to give your ear-drums a good hit but which you know is loaded with a blank, and you fire. You see the victim recoil in 'pain', with them exerting every effort to make it look as real as possible, and a squib explodes, causing 'blood' to fly. You have to be totally immersed in the situation and believe it entirely to be able to sell the scene to the audience.
Literally the only thing that differs, from the point of view of the person firing the gun, is that they know its not real. There are no other glaring indications. It's just knowledge that its not real, the memory of the context of walking onto a stage, etc. Now... can anyone explain why the experience wearing a VR helmet, even postulating 100% accurate visual reproduction, will somehow cause negative consequences that acting in a play never has?
Most who speak of the consequences of media do little more than rapidly display their own willingness (or inability) to ignore the difference between reality and fiction.
OBEs are pretty interesting. Some are obviously hallucinations, people prove it is not the real thing by shuffling a deck of cards when in body, and then checking the deck when OBE. If the cards in the two experiences don't match, the OBE is not real.
On the other hand, there are stories of hospital OBEs where patients actually learn confirmable information about the real world that they had no way of knowing if they did not really have an OBE. One example I've heard a couple times is a lady who saw a green tennis shoe on the roof of the hospital, and someone later went up and found it.
It is also interesting to learn the underpinnings of the Frankfurt school. I had thought they were communists of some sort, but communists are just as materialistic as the fascists they dislike. So, I guess they are a bit more nuanced in their views.
1. “So you can feel my energy? Through clothing? Blindfolded? Great, here’s a thin fabric screen, you should stand on that side, and point to where I am on the other, if I’m there at all.” No one gets that either.
why would my ancestors choose to let the virtual reality that is projected onto my self model, be one that shows another entity that looks very much how I think i look like plus a slightly different accent, avidly explaining that my reality is just a projection...?