Virtual Reality: A Complicated Reality
When I first watched Ready Player One directed by Steven Spielberg in theaters a few years ago, my imagination has since been arrested by the fantastic reality that VR brought to the movie’s world. Ready Player One takes place in the future, a time when humanity became uninterested in reality because of its grim conditions. A VR program was then developed to profit off of humanity’s dissatisfaction with the real world, called The Oasis. Wherever you are, you could put on your headset and escape to The Oasis and enjoy a world of boundless entertainment and excitement. For instance, you can “surf a 50-foot monster wave in Hawaii”, “ski down the pyramids”, or “climb Mount Everest — with Batman!” Thus, the world is literally your imagination. While the advanced VR technologies in Ready Player One that enable these ludicrous experiences will remain unattainable for years to come, the movie certainly gives us a glimpse of what the future might look like in a VR-dominated world.
VR stands shoulder-to-shoulder with other technologies of the future like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and Blockchain. Arguably, VR stands out among these technologies because it can alter our entire reality. AI, IoT, and Blockchain cannot do that — they generally function inconspicuously in the background to make our lives better. But VR can give us utterly different realities that we can employ for different purposes. In fact, its impacts are already felt in areas of training, industry, and gaming. In medical training, one study published in 2019 found that medical students trained using VR were able to carry out certain procedures quicker and more accurately than peers trained using traditional methods. In another example, the Teslasuit uses a full-body suit to offer an array of biometric sensors enabling the user’s heartbeat, perspiration, and other stress indicators to be measured. The suit is already used in NASA’s astronaut training and Walmart has used it to train retail staff to work in Black Friday situations, instructing them on how to best operate in busy shop environments with long queues of customers. In the work industry, Spatial, which creates a tool best described as a VR version of Zoom, reported a 1,000% increase in the use of its platform since the onset of the pandemic last year as businesses sought to retain an environment that fosters cooperative activity and the building of company culture with more employees now choosing to work from home. Spatial marks the start of a “dematerialized office”, where employees of a company can work interactively wherever they are in the world by simply slipping on a headset. Lastly, VR enables the gaming experience to be more immersive and impressive. Sandbox VR operates real-world VR centers that provide some of the most immersive experiences yet created using full-body haptic feedback suits, letting groups battle in deep space, aboard pirate ships, or fight through a zombie infestation. These uses of VR are only a small fraction of the full slew of possibilities that the technology can provide for us.
With any new important technology, there will be questions regarding its safety and ethics, and VR brings along no shortage of them. In Ready Player One, people practically live in The Oasis, only returning to reality for “eating, sleeping, and bathroom breaks.” This reality in the movie has already been marked as a concern for researchers, who state that long-term and frequent use of XR (superrealism) might lead to people prioritizing the virtual world over the real one. In the movie, it is also stated that “people come to The Oasis for all the things they can do but they stay because of all the things they can be — tall, beautiful, scary, a different sex, a different species, live-action, cartoon…” Regarding taking on another form, researchers say that individuals existing from VR with an enhanced virtual body may be problematic and that virtual embodiment can lead to emotional, cognitive, and behavioral changes, often for the worse. Legal and ethical responsibilities must also be carefully considered. Suppose the remote representation of someone causes psychological or physical harm to others. Who is responsible — especially in a case where the offender might argue that his or her intentions were not properly realized through the interface so that the harmful behavior was not intended? If a robot was the offender, under which legal jurisdiction does the issue fall — that of the robot or the robot’s manufacturer? Additionally, virtual violence and pornography will be readily available, arguably much more than the amount currently existing on the internet, and it will feel more real. What will the social consequences be for that? What if XR becomes so indistinguishable from reality that we become trapped, unable to return to the real world? These are just a few of the issues that VR, and in the future, XR, might challenge humanity.
The future of VR and what it could offer are incredibly promising. In a few decades, imagine putting on a headset and fighting in a virtual world with your favorite superheroes, or having classes from the top of a mountain and virtually interacting and collaborating with your classmates as if you were together. I would want to live in a world where these things are real, and I am sure you would too. But with any novel technology comes novel problems, and as humans of the 21st century, we must solve them and build a technologically advanced future that is both fantastic and secure.
