We're building virtual worlds to escape reality–then making them look real | Hacker News Reader

We're building virtual worlds to escape reality–then making them look real

syntheticauth.ai

2 pointszerolayers2 comments

This week brings us battlefield data as diplomatic currency, AI companions replacing human emotional labor, false memories manufactured by chatbots, cryptographic signatures for bot authentication, digital doppelgangers infiltrating workplaces, social media's structural dysfunction confirmed through simulation, and 3D worlds generated from single images. What emerges is humanity caught in a strange form of collective sleepwalking. We're creating the most sophisticated escape rooms in history, then filling them with perfect replicas of the "reality" we're trying to flee. It's as if we've confused the act of building new worlds with the much harder work of imagining different ways to live.

So far the XR applications I use the most are applications I've develop that have multiple windows floating in the air for classification tasks where there is a lot of clicking and not a lot of typing and a low key "minority report" UX is great -- these started out as ordinary web applications that "just worked" in XR (I might run it in passthrough mode or in a home world) and got a few tweaks to improve the XR experience.

Before I got addicted to Arknights I was playing a lot of Beat Saber, I really oughta get back into it. I've enjoyed games like Asgard's Wrath and Angry Birds VR and have a huge backlog of them to play but I also have a big backlog of flat games to play.

The thing is VR worlds can't be too crazy because people don't like motion sickn ess, I've learned how to suppress that reaction in almost all situations and instantly trust what my body is telling me and not my eyes when it gets bad (falling down in the real world hurts) but I'm a software developer who makes a living by accomodating myself to machines more than anyone else on the team.

One thing I think about is how the people in video games usually are in a much worse situation that me, say Arknights or Sword Art Online or Freedom Wars. Maybe it is a consolation that you have a bunch of girls following you around or see a lot of colored-pencil style CGs of kemonomini, furries, scalies and such.

Notably the GFX capabilities of current VR systems are not so good meaning (1) successful worlds are cartoony and (2) it takes a lot of development work if you want better GFX. The Horizon Worlds vision of an authoring tool for ordinary folkds to make little imitations of the real world is dead in the water. Some breakthrough that makes things like this

https://scaniverse.com/scan/uye43r2d4q3yhkpl

with no talent that covers a big area you can travel in might change that though.

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