Over the weekend, I took a trip to my parents’ house. I knew that my brother had recently purchased an HTC Vive, which is today’s leading Virtual Reality technology (at least, as far as I know, it is the only one that is on the market for personal use). This piece of technology is currently around $800, and it comes with the headset, earphones, two base stations, and controllers that are needed in order to play in virtual reality.
I was shocked by how well this product picked up my movement throughout the room. When I walked around, I actually walked around in-game. It currently captures your foot movement, and the controllers are held in your hands in order to pick up and move objects.
Playing in virtual reality is a rather terrifying experience. Two of your senses -- sight and hearing -- are in this "reality." But the thing is, it’s not reality. While you can see and hear something jump out at you in a game, you can’t touch it -- and it can’t touch you. But, your emotions can get so wrapped up in the game that you feel like it could be real! However, you can (and will) still run into walls in the real world, or trip over cords. It’s disorienting to take the headset off for the first time and made me feel like I was going to vomit. I had to keep one earbud out the whole time so I could still hear my sister and talk to her, and that seemed to help me in many ways.
All in all, I would say that Virtual Reality was a cool experience; however, what does this say about where our culture is headed? If VR becomes a common piece of technology in the household, there are many sad implications. I imagine a world full of people who use virtual reality to escape -- just like we currently use our computers and Netflix to avoid interactions with other people.
I have an addictive personality, and I have to limit my video game time to special situations in order to make sure that I can actually focus on the real world. If I had the ability to play in VR whenever I wanted, I feel that I would often struggle to interact with people in the real world. I can see a world where I only spent time in Virtual Reality, and never in reality for any reason other than to work.
However, this has some really cool applications, too! For the avid video gamer, VR offers something that a normal computer doesn’t -- and that’s movement. Several games can be physically exhausting if you play them for too long. There’s also Google’s TiltBrush, which is an amazing piece of technology that allows you to create virtual 3D art -- you can literally paint in the air.
Virtual Reality has both cool and scary applications, and I think that it’s up to us to decide how we use it. Hopefully, we’ll never have to live in a world where people only spend time in virtual reality, but we’ll be able to use it for tools that we couldn’t use otherwise.
