Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us?

Only a tiny minority of people have lived on a frontier, that’s sort of the inherent to the definition. Most people now live in a very constructed environment (urban areas). In the past, most people lived somewhere in between; towns, suburbs, etc.

Many of us find our mysteries in artificial areas: parks, little shops, back yards. There’s plenty of beauty and complexity in nature of course. But in human spaces we see just as much complexity and mystery; somebody builds something, it decays, gets fixed up, added to, gets some graffiti. We’ve all got little worlds in our heads that motivate us to do things, there’s plenty of complexity in there, especially once our actions start bouncing off each other.

I think most of the problem with VR so far has been, well… first, the tech just isn’t there yet, it kind of sucks still. But also we’re mostly getting silo’d VR experiences from single authors or companies. Games. There’s no mystery there because it was all intentionally placed by the designer. Eventually we’ll get better persistent dynamic multi-user spaces I bet.

Apple has been the king of telling consumers what they want for years. If they can't sell VR, I don't think anyone can sell VR. This feels like the make or break moment for VR, where we'll know what people want to use it for/if it's capable of living in the mainstream, or if it's forever going to live as a niche product, as it has been since the VR renaissance started when the Occulus Rift came onto the scene.

I'm curious how he feels about Half Life: Alyx.

What makes that game so compelling is the degree of interactivity it affords. You can pick up anything. If it's glass, you can break it. It allows you to interact with a tangible world to a degree that no other consumer VR software does.

It's one of the most well-reputed games of all time, and it's only available in VR. As such, modders have figured out how to make it playable without a VR headset. The reviews of non-VR players are that it's actually a pretty boring game when you're not in a simulated environment. If you're not taking the time to open the drawers and break the bottles and duck behind the barrels in a gunfight, it's mostly just walking through tunnels waiting for the occasional ambush.

I'm disappointed there are no images in this article. I'd love to see this. I love how it celebrates something by giving it a more playful character.

Is imagination not infinite?

Someone is still on this journey.

I think highly of Jaron and his unique point of view, but this is invalid.

This is one of the throughlines of Interstate 60. It's an absurd existential comedy from the writer of Back to the Future with an insane cast for an indie film. It was one of my favorite movies in college; I wonder how it holds up.

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From the movie:

> He said the frontier was a safety valve for civilization, a place for people to go to keep from goin' mad. So, whenever there were folks who couldn't fit in with the way things were, nuts, and malcontents, and extremists, they'd pack up and head for the frontier. That's how America got started - all the crackpots and troublemakers in Europe packed up and went to a frontier which became the thirteen colonies. When some people couldn't fit in with that, they moved farther west, which is why all the nuts eventually ended up in California. Turner died in 1932, so he wasn't around long enough to see what would happen to the world when we ran out of frontier. Some people say we have the frontier of the mind, and they go off and explore the wonderful world of alcohol and drugs, but that's no frontier. It's just another way for us to fool ourselves. And we've created this phony frontier with computers, which allows people to, you know, think they've escaped. A frontier with access fees?

On this line contrasting Apple's approach from Magic Leap's approach:

> Camera-based mixed reality is vastly easier to accomplish than the optical version, but it is concerning. Early research by a Stanford-led team has found evidence of cognitive challenges. Your hands are never quite in the right relationship with your eyes, for instance. Given what is going on with deepfakes out on the 2-D Internet, we also need to start worrying about deception and abuse, because reality can be so easily altered as it’s virtualized.

The two thoughts, cognitive challenges and deception, are unrelated. And Lanier spends no time saying why the optical version will be free of deepfakes. Instead he uses this piece of emotionally charged language to justify why the camera approach is inferior:

> Today, in much of the online world, algorithms calculate “feeds”—a term suggesting that people are cattle, and not free-range ones.

Again seemingly uninterested with engaging substantively with why the camera approach is worse than the optical one other than by making us feel, well, moral.

Then there's:

> Today, the V.R. community seems to want to make headsets smaller and smaller, until they disappear. But in the old days I’d build one-of-a-kind V.R. headsets into big masks from different cultures, sometimes adding lightning bolts and feathers. I wanted the headsets to be vibrant, exciting objects that enriched the real world, too.

It's unclear how much this is some shift in values vs simply a shift in aesthetic culture. The culture of the '80s and early-'90s was loud bikes, loud cars, big heavy computing, lots of cables. This isn't the aesthetic culture of today.

What confuses me the most is:

> There are fresh, urgent reasons to reaffirm the value of experience. It is impossible to judge technology without a sense of its purpose—and its only plausible purpose is to benefit people, or perhaps animals, or the over-all ecosystem of the planet. In any case, if we pursue technologies that make it hard to delineate the beneficiaries—for instance, by blending brains into robotics not to cure a disease but just because it seems cool—then we make the very idea of technology absurd.

Even though near the beginning Lanier says:

> V.R. can be a way of exploring the nature of consciousness, relationships, bodies, and, perception. In other words, it can be art. V.R. is most fun when approached that way.

So which is it? Must technology be anchored to a purpose or can it simply be art? The idea that technologies are purely utilitarian is surely not something people still believe right? Not after synthesizers, modded cars, modded motorcycles, personalized beatboxes, and the like?

Then there's:

> But the truth is that living in V.R. makes no sense. Life within a construction is life without a frontier. It is closed, calculated, and pointless. Reality, real reality, the mysterious physical stuff, is open, unknown, and beyond us; we must not lose it.

The average person in the developed world lives in a meticulously designed world. They ride some form of manmade transit or hop into some form of human constructed personal vehicle and go along infrastructure meticulously planned and designed to go to a destination whose very form has been prescribed by pages of municipal code and undergirded by large sums of public monies. They have access to sanitation systems, emergency services, and more. The average person does not spend time on some open frontier pondering their "real reality".

In general the article seems... like a weird, romantic, pastoral polemic steeped in the sort of romanticism common to older folks waxing about how the physical world is "real" while the virtual world is "fake."

I always roll my eyes when I see this or things that share a similar sentiment. I have dreams every night that aren't "real", but produce real emotions, feelings, and sensations. Whenever the dream machine comes out, I'll be hanging out in my cool af castle and all you philosophers can keep kneecapping yourselves with "what's really real".