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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

Why do people strive to create such realistic environments when they're a much more realistic world outside? Although I understand the purpose from a fantastical-escapist perspective, I wonder if this sort of increasingly realistic escapism actually is reflective of how we're making the real world far worse than it ever was before and we're preparing an alternative world to escape into due to our destructive tendencies.

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Imagine being able to experience a place that no longer exists. Close to my hometown there was a dam made that completely changed the landscape. But a museum reconstructed as best as they could the area so one can still see it as it was in VR and walk around.

That's one use.

There are many others, such as simulation of human behaviour in a digital twin (you can make sure experiment variables remain the same, difficult to do in the real world), collaboration and ease of access to archeological sites around the world, aiding architectural work, etc...

In my opinion, this will just lessen the negative cost of destroying landscapes. So, not a good thing.

The vast majority of people never leave the area they are raised, much less their country, either due to economics or culture.

There will always be a need for software like this as long as the world has these restrictions.

If people in such places had more immediate access to beautiful nature, then such a need wouldn't exist.

Disagree. I can have a beautiful garden and still have curiosity over what's my neighbour's garden looks like.

Son, you don’t need to see the desert or the ocean or the rainforest. You have a beautiful Midwest prairie right here at home.

Apropos of nothing, it seems weird to me that we observe a vocabulary distinction in identical phenomena based on where those phenomena are located.

A prairie is called a steppe if it's in Asia. A steppe is called a prairie if it's in America.

A hurricane is a typhoon, except it's striking the west coast of the Atlantic instead of the west coast of the Pacific.

None of these make any difference to what the object is like. Why do we care? We don't call mountains something different when they're in Asia. We don't even call them something different when they're underwater, which makes a huge difference.

Well, hurricane is a Caribbean word and typhoon is an Arabic word. These two languages named the phenomenon before they could share a word for it.

Your distinction around hurricane vs typhoon is off. Typhoon is the name in the pacific west of 180 degrees longitude (in the jurisdiction of the JMA), hurricane is the name in the pacific east of 180 degrees, or in the atlantic (jurisdiction of the NHC). In the south pacific and indian ocean, they are called cyclones instead, so there's really three names. The difference in naming is simply because the organization responsible for reporting on them is going to use the name most familiar to it's country of origin.

Also, prairie and steppe are subtly different, though if it weren't for historic reasons they might be named the same. A prairie is more moist and has more vegetation as a result, and can support more trees and general flora/fauna.

> In the south pacific and indian ocean, they are called cyclones instead, so there's really three names.

This is not true of American English, where "cyclone" unambiguously refers to a tornado.

I'm going to disagree with you there. Anecdotally, I've lived in tornado alley my whole life and nobody has ever referred to a tornado as a cyclone in real-life conversation, although I'd know what they're referring to based on context clues.

Outside the heartland, the NHC categorizes many storms below the level of hurricane (64 knot sustained winds) as various kinds of cyclone (tropical cyclone, extratropical cyclone, potential tropical cyclone, post-tropical cyclone, alongside depressions).

In fact, in meteorology terms, a tornado is definitively different from a cyclone (a column of rotating area vs an area of area rotating around a low-pressure system). Hurricanes and typhoons are both kinds cyclones.

Not that weird. The English language emerged from the needs of people from various linguistic backgrounds to describe things. It was not cleanly designed with top down clarity.

I agree with the sentiment. My point was not exotic nature, but any nature. Some people do not even have that.

Nature isn't the only, or even the most interesting thing to see out there. Even if you are that much into nature, you'll observe that it too is meaningfully different around the world.

I'm balancing my desire to live near nature with my desire to live near a grocery store, a library, and a rock climbing gym

If cities were better designed, the balancing would be much easier.

You're reading way too much into it. It's just fun.

If I play a mile I'm like Arma, I don't actually want to be a soldier. Me playing Cooking Mama isn't a veiled psychological thing: I like both cooking and the gamified, simulated cooking.

I don't mean to say that it's not fun, and fun ins't a valid reason. I only mean to say that the absolute intensity has one component that motivated by real-world destruction. Of course there are other factors.

Unreal engine is used for much more than just games.

It’s used for architectural Visualization, film backgrounds, and industrial visualization among other things.

Surely you can imagine why having realistic settings is beneficial in those scenarios.

>I wonder if this sort of increasingly realistic escapism actually is reflective of how we're making the real world far worse than it ever was before and we're preparing an alternative world to escape into due to our destructive tendencies.

No. Some people just like realism in their video games, and prefer the immersion or just think it looks cool. Not everything is a manifestation of existential dread.

True, but there must be a contribution of force towards more realistic environments. I never said it was the ONLY reason.

Increased quality of processors and graphics hardware allow designers to push the limits, and "realism" has been a competition in games for a long time. Every console generation touts the realism of its graphics versus previous generations and the competition. And for certain games like Cyberpunk or GTA, realism enhances the gameplay experience.

If there were a general trend towards creating realistic enviroments as a means of psychological escape, one would expect those environments to tend to be more pristine and idyllic than reality. But often that realism is used to depict worlds no better, and sometimes far worse, than our own.

I'm sure some people are using realism as a means of escaping the destruction of our real world, walking simulators and the like exist, but I don't think that's a relevant influence overall. Just like with realistic CGI, people mostly do it because they can.

Tourism itself is quite destructive both to local communities and to nature. There’s a reason tourist hotspots are increasingly anti-tourist, and national parks are now forced to ration out visits via a lottery. While I agree that a virtual environment is less impressive than the real thing, it’s not a difficult argument to make that it is actually much better for the world to have digital alternatives.

I agree. I am not referring to tourism, but nature available for locals.

Simulation is a really useful tool for practice! I’m pretty sure this Hang Gliding sim uses Cesium for its environment: https://freeflightexperience.com/

I know people who will practice flying at unfamiliar sites on it first - so that they’re better prepared when they get to the real thing.

Have a handicapped daughter who I can't share a hike with since wheelchairs and rugged mountain trails don't go together well. Something like this would make sharing the experience quite a bit better - particularly with AR to allow us both to experience together (VR being a bit restrictive to just the person viewing and not the others there).

I think it might also have to do with traveling to the places they want to see not being a feasible Thing to do for sind people, for financial reasons for example. Digital recreations (or similar environments) are cheap or even free to "visit", while also bein more accessible (no traveling neeeded).

This is like asking why they made film when cartoons exist. It's a means to achieve an artistic vision.

I understand that. And I fully support the artistic vision. However, many creations take on secondary functions within a complex system that goes beyond the intention of the inventor or even the people who USE the product.

For example, the INTENTION of antidepressants may have been at one time to treat severe depression, but as society (hypothetically) gets worse and more depressing, they may be used to help people cope with systemic problems and therefore ameliorate people's reaction to them.

Or phones: they initially were created to help people communicate but they are subverted (co-opted) by the system to make people more dependent on technology for the sake of technological growth.

Any number of products or ideas can start as one thing and become co-opted to serve a more insidious function beyond their initial purpose.

You'd rather have me set it on fire and exploded in the virtual or in the real world?

They point of having virtual environments is to enable you to see things in them you'd rather not see in real life.

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