An Agoraphobic Traveler Wanders the Earth | Hacker News Reader

An Agoraphobic Traveler Wanders the Earth

atlasobscura.com

41 pointsexanimo_sai15 comments

Traipsing through Street view in VR is even more surreal.

I got my grandma to try it on Oculus and she couldn't get enough. At one point she asked if she could call up my aunt to come at the door when I showed her my aunt's house on the other side of the world :).

I had been getting antsy due to this lockdown, but this made me appreciate my grandma's patience and fortitude even more for being practically locked down for over 10 years. I'm glad I could help her experience cities from all around the world at this age

Oculus TV/YouTube also have a series of immersive VR travelogues, some even in 3D which are even more unreal. There's definitely a lot more reasons to try out VR than gaming, if you haven't already. Especially if you're somewhere you won't be able to realistically step out any time soon

> At one point she asked if she could call up my aunt to come at the door

Cute, but I can't imagine how hard it would be to live in a world where the systems I interact with every day are so far beyond my understanding. That would drive me insane pretty quickly.

Is it that far beyond her understanding though? It's as simple as saying:

"No, it's like someone's taken a picture of the world and you're looking at it."

She basically thought she was somehow represented in that part of the world by wearing the goggles.

It's scary to be that wrong about reality.

> She basically thought she was somehow represented in that part of the world by wearing the goggles.

Not really

It's only a half-step from what we already have, you have to think about it technically to realize how difficult it is. We already have live broadcasts, CCTVs, aerial imagery and photo satellites. Astral projection is almost the same thing :)

I suspect even very educated people might make this class of mistake if they don't take the time to think about how something works.

The fact that all of these comments are disagreeing with you is concerning. Are most people this confused in their day-to-day lives? If I ever discovered I had a misunderstanding of that magnitude, I would be shocked and appalled.

If you think you have a firm grasp on reality, I've got some bad news for you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

She probably thouht it was a live feed. Street map is just using 2d images, but what if we could record in real 3d, so that you could walk around the scene!

TL;DR I feel most folks aren't bothered about understanding these things (I'm not judging, but just the way it is)

I believe most actually take such kind of advanced tech for granted.

e.g I remember just 10 years ago the tech behind face swapping / Instagram and TikTok filters was purely the stuff of image processing/ ML papers . Today the average non-technical user seems to know nothing about how cutting edge this tech is, and doesn't really seem to care. I think it's a testament to how well this tech is packaged and made available to the end user. Call it UX or whatever you want.

Even if you just consider something like WiFi/mobile data, I personally find it a miracle that my devices are somehow communicating through the air; but the average user seems to take this for granted and hardly wonders about how it works. The frustration if any, only seems to kick in when something they have come to expect to "just work" doesn't work the way they are used to (and not sparing a thought for the fact that it somehow works in the first place).

Perhaps adding real-life destinations in the video games would make this trips more fun. Like Red Dead Redemption/GTA with more real places.

I suspect people who do this would enjoy exploring in the Geoguesser game [1] where you are dropped somewhere in the street view world and have to figure out where.

[1] https://www.geoguessr.com

Love it.

Microsoft Flight Simulator (the upcoming one) will render the entire world using satellite imagery and Bing maps.

Assassin's Creed did this to some extent with Rome and other cities.

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