Reality was nice while it lasted, I suppose, but it’s time to get ready for virtual reality. The hype is growing as companies such as Facebook’s Oculus, Valve, Samsung and Sony prepare to unleash a wave of futuristic headsets that will transport users out of our physical world and into a virtual alternative.
Until now, I haven’t been able to shake the suspicion that virtual reality is primarily aimed at gamers, basically a fancy gimmick to force them to upgrade their consoles. The technology, however, is in its early stages and the technical challenges that limit it today are eminently solvable. If devices such as the Oculus Rift are considered mindblowing right now, how compelling are they going to be a decade or two decades from now? And how many uses will we find for them?
So let’s consider what implications virtual reality might have if it begins to take up our attention and how it might interpose itself into our lives and habits.
When pondering the fine line between reality and non-reality, few writers are as illuminating as Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinian writer who artfully explored the intellectual limits of metaphysics in his singular short stories.
In one of them, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Borges writes about an imaginary planet devised as an intellectual exercise by a "benevolent secret society", which included among its number the philosopher George Berkeley.
At first, the planet, Tlön, exists only in an exhaustive and elusive encyclopaedia, drawn up by the far-flung members of the society, but gradually it begins to manifest in the real world, as more and more volumes of the encyclopaedia come to light. It sparks a craze, so to speak, with people eager to learn more about this wondrous place full of “transparent tigers and towers of blood”.
Soon, though, the culture of Tlön begins to subsume that of the real world.
“Almost immediately, reality yielded on more than one account,” writes the narrator Borges. “The truth is it longed to yield . . . How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet?”
So will our reality yield once Oculus presents us with a more orderly planet to enjoy? It’s a question worth pondering.
My scepticism about virtual reality’s potential was based largely on that sense of its being a gamer-centric platform sharply limited by those absurd-looking headsets, but I had never used a VR headset, so that scepticism was never tested by experience. But the thing about VR is that it has no real antecedents, nothing upon which it can be mentally modelled, so virtual reality can’t be described, only experienced.
Deceptively simple
Then last month, I got my hands on a Google Cardboard. It is a deceptively mundane name for a deceptively simple device: a foldable box with lenses that turns your smartphone into a virtual reality engine.
First, I watched a 10-minute New York Times documentary called The Displaced, following three children from Ukraine, South Sudan and Syria. I say watched, but actually the most accurate verb is experienced: standing in the same field as Chuol while aid planes drop food from the sky or sitting in the same truck as Hana goes to work on a farm at dawn, the visceral sense of being transported to a new place was astonishing. The displacement of the title referred not only to the children, but also to the temporary state of the viewer. And there went my scepticism: virtual reality is not just for gaming, that's for sure.
Wide-eyed optimism
About the same time, I saw Oculus founder Palmer Luckey on stage at the Web Summit, discussing his groundbreaking headset, which is due to be launched in the next few months. Luckey is only 23, but he makes for a compelling VR advocate, all wide-eyed optimism and giddy enthusiasm, and he made some fascinating points about VR.
Chief among them was that we are going to have to redraw some key assumptions that have gone unquestioned for millenniums.
“It’s going to change the way that we look at what’s real and what isn’t,” he promised confidently. “Right now, there’s a distinction between what’s real and what isn’t based mostly on value and how easy it is to interact with . . . If VR advances enough, that line might blur a lot.”
Our definition of reality will have to come to terms with the intrusion of virtual reality: as the technology inexorably improves, our ability to perceive the distinctions will become less reliable and perhaps less important.
But even in the face of Luckey’s optimism, I find myself drawn towards Borges’s sense of, well, displacement.
“The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world,” he warned. “Enchanted by its rigour, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigour of chess masters, not of angels.”
