Posts Tagged ‘Virtual Reality’
Hot posts this week (Aug. 8/2015)
Posted on: August 24, 2015
Hot posts this week (Aug. 8/2015)
Are we Preferring Virtual Reality to Reality? Is that a bad trend in our evolution?
- And the Lebanese begin to party: Wars? Terrorism? Garbage catastrophe? Where are they?
- Is the Greek Crisis Over? Why this overwhelming silence in the news media?
- Keep your stinky deadly bacteria packed Shoes outside the door of home
- Do you still think your Conscious Brain Directs Your Actions?
- Could Coloring Be a better Alternative To Meditation?
- How to learn to stay clean? How to handle house waste?
- Baalbeck is back on Olympus: International Festival of Baalbeck
- Look to Africa as a hotbed of innovation?
- Occupy Wall Street Calls for New Mental Shift: “Protest Is Broken” and The End of Protest?
Are we in a Transition phase from Gaming Accessories to Cybernetic Devices?
Posted on: August 12, 2015
Are we in Transition phase from Gaming Accessories to Cybernetic Devices?
It’s hard to discuss the future of virtual reality without addressing its relationship to gaming.
“A well designed game can even transcend reality and transplant the player into the world of the game, putting us into different bodies, different times, and different places.” — Dave Beaudoin
Industry analysts anticipate 2016 will be the breakout year for virtual reality and no doubt gaming will be key to its success.
And as the excitement builds around VR, it’s worth remembering that gamers have been patiently pining for VR for decades.
Perhaps it’s telling that Palmer Luckey, who has support from the gaming community, got his start modding Nintendo consoles.
For the short-term success of VR, all eyes are on video games to do what they do best: convince consumers to make the costly investment into new hardware platforms.
As first-gen VR headsets hit the shelves soon, companies look to develop new games for established fan bases and adapt popular games to VR in hopes of giving the technology traction and living up to gamer expectations.
But surely VR means more to gaming than just enhancing the experience?
Whether it was on their old school Atari 2600 or the PS4, gamers know what it’s like to get sucked into video games.
Often, at the heart of the best games is immersion. In a fascinating 2010 post titled “The Psychology of Immersion in Video Games”, author Jamie Madigan summarizes that force that pulls gamers in, known as spatial presence:
The process starts with players forming a mental model of the game’s make-believe space by looking at various cues (images, movement, sounds, and so forth) as well as assumptions about the world that they may bring to the table. Once that mental model of the game world is created, the player must decide, either consciously or unconsciously, whether she feels like she’s in that imagined world or in the real one.
Now, getting sucked into a video game isn’t necessarily dependent upon having stellar graphics or sound.
Board games can achieve the same sense of immersion using paper, dice, and cardboard (though a good dose of imagination and focus is required to pull it off).
With video games, the barrier to immersion is lower because the slew of sensory information provides dynamic and real-time engagement.
As Steven Kotler has described, the immersion that derives from spatial presence in games promotes mental “flow” states. Today, the combination of context, theme, and challenges allow games to achieve relatively mild flow states compared to what could potentially be designed in the future once flow and other mental states are reverse engineered.
And herein lies VR’s potential to take immersion to a whole other level.
Thanks to improved computing hardware, VR offers a sensory richness that can be approach real world depth.
Additionally, the ability to completely saturate sensory fields lies in stark contrast to the sights and sounds coming from the black monoliths we play games on.
Today, those fields are visual and auditory alone, but tomorrow, they very well could be smell, taste, touch, and beyond. Finally, achieving operating speeds that match the brain’s processing of sensory information will fool the brain into crossing the Uncanny Valley, literally putting the ‘reality’ in virtual reality.
In this way, future VR could make it effortless to achieve immersion and promote flow, and not just with games. What does this look like on a long enough timeline? Like hacking the brain. VR headsets won’t just enhance gaming, they’ll enhance our lives cybernetically in ways yet unimaginable.
Note: My conjecture is that extended sensory technology will create bypass neural networks that will circumvent the hierarchy in our nervous system. The Neo-Cortex will be sidelined for many sensory filtering processes.
“Future VR could make it effortless to achieve immersion and promote flow, and not just with games.
What does this look like on a long enough timeline? Like hacking the brain.”
Are we Preferring Virtual Reality to Reality? Is that a bad trend in our evolution?
Posted on: August 7, 2015
Are we Preferring Virtual Reality to Reality? Is that a bad trend in our evolution?
Is It Really So Bad If We Prefer Virtual Reality to Reality?
As I’ve been developing this series, I’ve gotten to spend time with people who are working on the coolest innovations in virtual reality.
Surprisingly, whether they’re the CEO of a haptics company or an academic researcher, one topic consistently comes up in conversation: What will happen when the technology has evolved to the point that people actually prefer virtual experiences to real ones?
This question has captured the imagination of science fiction writers for generations.
But it was a question that only science fiction writers needed to worry about, since it was technologically unfeasible.
In the internet age, however, we already choose virtual experiences over “real” ones on a regular basis. We do it every time we choose to post on a friend’s Facebook wall instead of meeting them at a coffee house.
VR changes things considerably not only because is it immersive, but it also simulates the feeling of physical presence; and that’s likely to be much more addictive than simply staring at a computer screen.
Even at this early stage of the consumer industry, the technology already exists to give people full body immersive experiences and social interaction. Couple HTC’s Vive rig and AltSpace‘s social environments or High Fidelity’s facial motion detection and social interaction with hand tracking devices like Perception Neuron’s gloves or Leap Motion, and you can already get pretty close to a feeling of full physical immersion.
Even though these innovations are in the early stages of development, it’s easy to see their potential.
In the near future, we could experience incredible worlds which can only be built and experienced in virtual reality — worlds much more vast and diverse than what we are able to experience in our daily lives today.
Like how the internet has made us feel closer and more connected, virtual experiences have the potential to elevate our collective consciousness even more by allowing people access to experiences that are currently not possible.
We might even begin to think of access to virtual experiences as a human right, the way we think of access to the internet today.
So the question is, would it be so bad if we chose to spend our days in virtual worlds fulfilling our deepest desires and weirdest fantasies? (Sure. day in, day out)
Where do we draw the line on too much virtual and not enough reality? (Where do you draw the line on suicide frequency?
What’s the big philosophical question about VR on your mind lately?
Tweet to us @singularityhub or to me directly @svm118 so we can explore your questions as part of the series.
“We might even begin to think of access to virtual experiences as a human right, the way we think of access to the internet today.”
Adonis Diaries 