I wonder if the author has ever experienced the joy of reading a good book, or the first showing an amazing movie. Finishing an amazing story, you feel a let down afterwords; the characters were not real and you can never interact with them. The realm of fictional worlds are often more engaging, and seem superior to the world you live your day-to-day life in. The actions and experiences in those stories were more fulfilling, the characters had more agency; their lives or stories were more "real" than ours. After experiencing the greatness of our imaginations, how can our bleak reality measure up? I often find that I start reading my next book immediately after finishing the previous one in attempt to recapture this high, to re-experience the betterness one more time.
I don't think this effect is specific to a medium. That it can happen with VR is a sign that the technology has matured.
A few years ago I started reading "The Wheel of Time" by Robert Jordan. I had somehow timed it so that the week I finished the thirteenth book "Towers of Midnight" the fourteenth book "A Memory of Light" came out. I blew through the first chunk of the book and then got to a chapter that was over a hundred pages long, maybe even longer, Google says it was over fifty thousand words. It was the last battle, the moment the previous four million words had been leading up to. I read a few pages and then set it down. For six months. It was obvious the series was going to end in a way that was bittersweet (as all good stories end) but I just couldn't bear the thought of there being nothing left.
By putting it down I was freezing the moment I had left it in time. When I returned to finish the book I felt that familiar sense of sadness. A period of my life (fourteen months!) was over. I'll probably re-read the books someday, but I know it won't be the same. I often get that feeling when I finish a work of fiction I enjoyed greatly. But there was something about "The Wheel of Time' that made it much more profound.
Any medium that can tell a story that people find intense and immersive will produce that same feeling. Why would VR be any different?
I felt the same way the day I went to check the results of the french baccalaureate at my high-school. A warm summer day surrounded with friends, acquaintances, and other people I went to school with every day for years. There was joy, sadness sometimes and an overwhelming feeling of excitement about what the future holds. We were laughing together, drinking already, lots of discussions. Everyone was here.
I remember everything, every single detail, from the bitter smoke of the cigarettes to the sweet smell of drying leaves. That's all very vivid. And I can recall that incredible feeling of solitude. In fact, the certitude that this was over. That from now on, I would only ever be able to look back on this period of my life.
Honestly, this was a strange experience. I had the feeling to be extremely old, on a death bed and looking back to the life I had. When in fact, reality could not have been further removed from that setting. I was barely 18 years old, and about to start a whole new life in North-America.
You know there is something incredible about the carelessness of one's youth. Of course, to appreciate it fully you would need to be aware of it. That, in fact, would kind of weaken that very state of mind now that I think about it.
Plus France is such a wonderful country to grew-up in. I know it might sound ridiculous, but at 21 years old, I already feel a little bit like my best years are behind me. Or rather, that the warmth and happiness I have experienced will remain unmatched from now on. It's hard to think about the gardens of Paris or the Cathédrale de Reims' parvis in the summer without a heavy heart. They were my companions for nearly two decades, and years later I still don't want to say goodbye...
It's incredible that we haven't found a way to reproduce the social warmth of a school class. After that period where you're constantly surrounded with a group of 30+ potential friends with a 1-year cycle, everyone goes their way and never socializes that much again. They may build families, assume CEO positions or head for humanitarian causes, I personally flatshared for 14 years after high school, but we tend to surround ourselves with likeminded people (due to the network in which we meet those people) and we barely ever meet the variety and intensity of high school relationships. And society has never built anything similar to high schools for grown-ups.
That said, high school also had its social games. Most people recall having been bullied or excluded at one point or another during scolarity.
Thank you for the kind words! For what it's worth, I have considered joining my country's reserve army. It's only a few weeks of commitment per year (and a couple months of basic training). Friends of mine have already joined, they almost unanimously enjoy it a lot. You get to meet people from all walks of life that often share little else than the desire to serve. That aspect has also been of the major reasons re-instituting mandatory military draft for a few months to a year is highly popular in France. Conscription has been said to tear down social barriers between classes and reinforce a common sense of civic duty. Whether this is true or not, I don't know. That's an old idea that has massive support in the french society.
And even those who dislike the idea of having a trained conscript army in addition to regular troops have their own version of conscription. The overall tone is the same, only the military context is replaced with community work.
Either way, it is hard to imagine the shape and form of such organization because of the sheer scale at which it has to operate to be even remotely efficient. I agree with what you said about college. You meet people, lots of people, and in fact lots of similar people. There is relatively little space for the kind of variance you see in high-school when the members of the community are filtered by their performance on a standardized test anyway.-
An important difference, at least for me, is that in school you still lead a very sheltered life with few worries. Once you're done with homework you're actually free for the rest of the day and can pursue leisure activities without the nagging feeling that you should instead do this or that. Being free is the default mode and working is a special state. At some point in live this seems to flip around.
I actually socialize in groups now more than I did in school, but I didn't like most of the people at schools; To the extent that immediately after school I was pretty withdrawn, and am still surprised how friendly strangers interact with me as an adult.
Thank you, I'm glad you liked it! It was a good way to relief homesickness a little bit. I'm trying hard to get a better grasp of English, so your compliment means a lot. Thanks again. :-)
Try 20 years. I started the story back when book 5 came out and re-read (or skimmed) the series each time a book came out. I literally grew up alongside the characters (although book time certainly slowed as the series progressed). I cried when I read that chapter, finishing in tears; it still smarts a little today.
Every emotive, immersive experience seems to produce some whiplash of the soul upon separation. As you noted, this is not unique to VR or even literary works. Even so, since one's first such is the most memorable, VR will likely slowly replace older works in this department.
I get like this with my favorite things. I do it less frequently than I did as a child, but I still do. It's silly I guess.
The last book I did this with was "Permutation City" by Greg Egan. There's probably less than an hour's worth of reading left, but I just don't want it to end. This was maybe a year ago and I still haven't touched it since. Eventually I'll probably re-read it from the beginning and actually finish it.
I also do it for bands I really like that are slow to put out albums. I haven't heard the latest GSY!BE (from early 2015) yet, not because I don't want to, but because who knows if they're going to go through another 13 year gap between albums! Maybe in 2020 I'll be having a really bad night and 40 minutes of "new" music from one of my favorite bands is exactly what I'll need.
Egan's becoming a better author over time, though. Permutation City is a relatively early novel... but I hope you'll look at the others as well, if you haven't already.
I think my favorite has to be Schild's Ladder, just for sheer conceptual interestingness. I ended up writing fanfiction for it.
The best one from a literary standpoint is probably the Clockwork Rocket trilogy, though.
I'm definitely excited to read more by Egan, and already own a few of his other works. I just tend to binge on sci-fi and haven't been in that mood since, well, not-finishing Permutation City.
I originally bought Permutation City because of a recommendation on HN. Schild's Ladder might have to be my next sci-fi read for the same reason. "Sheer conceptual interestingness" is pretty much exactly what I want, haha.
Quick google says it talks about parallel transport. If that's true in any meaningful sense, I'm happy differential geometry science fiction is a thing. :)
This is going to sound silly (and tangential to the original topic), but Permutation City gave me the idea for my last startup. I liked the idea of being able to rent out compute power from anywhere in the world, AWS style, but where the supply of compute could be democratized.
Anyway, I would recommend finishing it. It's a great book.
For what its worth, Egan has written a few works that follow up on, and expand, the ideas presented in Permutation City. Most notably Diaspora and Schild's Ladder. So there's more to enjoy after you finish it :-)
I actually bought Diaspora and Axiomatic while still within the first few chapters of Permutation City because I liked it so much. That was on the tail end of a sci-fi binge though, and I haven't read Diaspora yet, or much sci-fi since. Next time I feel like it though, I know I've got a very good backlog waiting for me.
Here's hoping I don't want to finish his other novels either :)
Finishing "A Memory of Light" and the The Wheel of Time series left me in a funk that lasted a whole week. I sometimes regret finishing the series, I now know how it ends, so I can not go back and re-read the series for a 4th time.
Audiobook the whole thing! Re-reading is hard, but taking the slow path with audiobooks is great. Personally, I've had some of the best memories of the books while listening to them while hiking. Especially for fantasy books, walking/adventuring while listening is great fun.
Re-reading is anything but hard. It's like slipping back into my 17 year old self, complete with breaks to jump around like an idiot because I'm so hyped and I need to expend a bit of this pent up energy before getting back to the whole reading thing.
At least there's fanfiction. It might not be ever up to snuff as the original author's work, but some are quite entertaining, albeit in different ways.
>> but I just couldn't bear the thought of there being nothing left.
As I exited my 20's and entered my 30's, I had to deal with several deaths in the family and having to finally deal with my own mortality, this has affected me in profound ways.
I've done the same thing you have, albeit with several movie trilogies. I skipped the last Matrix movie, I refused to go see the last LOTR movie (even though I read the books when I was in my teens and knew what was going to happen), and the same thing in the Divergent series.
It's practically become a common theme in my life - some sort of psychological avoidance to have to deal with the ending of a story, the emotions and the emptiness of something I pursued for so long, now at an end.
I purposefully read both the last Harry Potter (which I assume everyone knows) and Lev Grossman's "The Magician's Land" (which I assume less people know) slow for that very reason.
Yeah, reading the Magician's Land took me longer than the previous two combined, because as much as I wanted to know what happened next, I also wanted to preserve that feeling of wanting to know what happens next.
This is one advantage of A Song of Ice and Fire (a.k.a. Game of Thrones). At the rate the books are being written the series will never finish in our lifetimes. I can only hope we perfect cyberbrain technology soon so George R. R. Martin can finish the work, typing out a single line per day or so.
Have to agree on the wheel of time. It's a shame it had to finish. That level of escapism over so many books is hard to match. Finish it and you're lost for weeks.
Wouldn't it be cool if there were written multiple endings for the story? One is randomly selected when you start reading, and you won't know which one! Would that bring back the excitement?
Oddly I think it wouldn't, and wonder why. Is it because we want to know the one single ending the author intended?
The 'Dragon Age' and 'Mass Effect' series of video games has player choices -- that may not be apparent in advance -- which influence the fates of characters you bond with, and alters the ending. I have not finished a complete playthrough of any of these games, because I'm afraid that my choices will leave me with regret, and when I come back to make different choices, the novelty will be gone, and the suspense, the hopes and the fears, the genuine real-world emotions I feel wouldn't be the same.
In my case, having multiple endings to a book would definitely make my hesitation worse.
I felt the same way when I finished Memory of Light. I had been reading WoT since 1994. The book definitely marked an end to a period of my life. It wasn't just the end of the book. There were changes going on at the time leading to greater maturity. It included a cross country move and shedding of most of my possessions, including many of my physical books. I had realized collecting dead tree versions of sci fi and fantasy was more wishful thinking on my part (more practical to get the books on Kindle, very easy to move cross country with them).
I was also disappointed with the ending. I roughly knew the general sketch of the ending based on remarks Jordan made at a DragonCon. I knew he had written that entire series just to get to that ending. But by the time I had reached Memory of Light, I saw a possibility for something even greater.
A year later, the unpublished chapter on Damonadred (don't remember how to spell his name) came out and therein lies that possibility. Except no one will write that epic :-D
That existential anguish that comes from having journeyed ablong way -- well, the Wheel keeps turning. That's the point. There is a koan that goes, "before enlightenment? Chop wood carry water. After enlightenment? Chop wood carry water."
Stories always come to an end, no matter how magnificent. It does not matter whether that story is a work of fiction, or something you tell about yourself. What doesn't end is awareness. The Wheel moves on.
> I'll probably re-read the books someday, but I know it won't be the same.
That is how I felt about Planescape: Torment, widely regarded to have one of the best tales of all RPGs, and all other great stories in other mediums.
It makes me wish there was some way to get selective voluntary amnesia, where you wipe all memories of the specific content of something, just keep the feeling that it's something you have to experience [again].
I'm lucky (?) enough to have the involuntary form of this to some degree for media. I will often forget the plot points of a movie I've watched within days to weeks, and in many cases after a year I have completely forgotten ever even having watched it. I'll pick a movie, my wife will say "we've already seen that", I'll say "I don't think so", she lovingly puts up with me because she luckily likes re-watching movies, and even by the end of the show I'll have nothing but a vague sense of deja-vu the whole time.
I have on multiple occasions, rewatched movies with twist endings like The Usual Suspects and still been surprised on the second or third viewing.
I'd rather have my wife's photographic (videographic) movie recall though...
I wish that too. In particular, I'd like to wipe Mass Effect trilogy from my memories, at least temporarily. It had huge emotional impact on me, and I would love to relive it all again - unfortunately, I still pretty much remember the entire plot after the years (and though ME has some interesting degree of non-linearity based on your in-game decision, there's still too much of the plot that's constant to really enjoy a replay without a memory wipe).
You don't need amnesia to feel an experience fresh again. It's a matter of mindfulness. Sure, it takes some training. Someone who is present in the moment will always feel everything is fresh and alive.
Indeed. That's how I try to relive an experience of a great story, be it a game or book or movie. The best way though, is to replay it with someone else, who is new to it.
In a little over a month, I read the entire 11 volumes (12? I forget) of the John Carter of Mars series when I was in 6th grade.
When I finished the last book, 12-year-old me cried. This epic whirlwind of a journey was over forever. And no one else in the world around me even acknowledged it had existed.
When I was in Congo and experienced talking to the women that had been raped, the tortures, the children that had killed their parents or raped their sister at gunpoint and even being involved in a shooting, with bullets whistling over your head I entered into a psychological shock.
I could not stop thinking: This can't be real, this can't be reality BUT IT IS reality. You start realizing really what the people experienced in WWII and how reality surpasses fiction, how terrible and how amazing life could be.
I was an avid reader but it is one thing to read on the safety on your house and a completely different thing experiencing it in reality. I can't stand reading war novels now like War and peace because it really hurts me after experiencing some of it.
And then you have this "living dangerous" thing in which you want more and more of this war experience, like going deeper in the jungle and talk with people in arms even when you are risking your life and a mistake means death.
You watch things you don't want to remember but you want more and more for some stupid reason.
VR will be a great tool for people learning but it could be dangerous with some things too.
"That’s what I love about this place, all the secrets, all the little things I never noticed even after all these years. You know why this beats the real world, Lawrence? Real world is just chaos. It’s an accident. But in here, every detail adds up to something."
Yeah I was going to add that I get sad after a good book or tv show or film or video games but reading the article it seems to talk about a much more debilitating effects related to the increased immersion from VR. I think it warrants some closer study specifically because it reminds me of that scene from Inception, where people prefer their VR life over their own and end up like junkies in an opium den.
If you look at how good computer graphics have gotten, it's no a far stretch to see where it will be in 20 years, 40 years. Suddenly, the are-we-in-a-simulation philosophical debate comes to mind.
>Finishing an amazing story, you feel a let down afterwords; the characters were not real and you can never interact with them.
For whatever reason I've never heard anyone say this before but that's exactly the experience I had after I went and saw James Cameron's "Avatar" (2009) in 3D at the cinema back when it came out. I think I may have had that same feeling after finishing a couple of books as well -- probably after Catch-22 and after Cryptonomicon -- and likely some other movies too but Avatar is the one that I remember having had that feeling after.
Anyway, thanks for making me aware that others have felt the same way about fiction. Of course, I don't believe that any of my feelings are unique in the way that nobody else has felt the same but I hope you get what I mean. Also, when I say that I remember the feeling, I don't mean mean to say that I still keep wishing I could travel to Pandora or interact with the blue catpeople -- the feeling itself faded within a few hours or days or something like that, but the memory of having had that feeling stuck with me :)
Yeah, I tend to agree. I think you can probably toss this on the list of lessons that human beings seem completely incapable of learning (myself included).
I am more optimistic. Some people may react to those feelings by going and constructing some of that world in reality. Isn't that sort of the link between a whole range of SciFi/Comic books in the 50's and landing on the moon?
And we can not only hope that the Star Trek economics of abundance comes about, but that it is made true through a combination of technology and new economic thought.
Agreed. This whole phenomenon was reported on widely after "Avatar" came out. News anchors gleefully reporting that people left the theater feeling depressed their world wasn't as fantastic as Avatar. More of "the kids aren't alright!" reporting they love to do to scare parents and elderly folks.
My solution: Move out of the big cities. I live in a small town in the countryside and my world is that fantastic.
> More of "the kids aren't alright!" reporting they love to do to scare parents and elderly folks.
Sadly this is one of those topics, like violence in video games, where we don't get beyond this cycle of "accuse and deny". Which is a shame because IMO there are really important topics here we need to address collectively such as how this connects to addiction http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
The "data point" I've been able to confirm with other parents of small kids (under 10) is there is a connection between extended periods of computer-aided escapism and aggression.
The experiment you can try with most kids is give them a smartphone or iPad for 1-2 hours then take it away again with minimal warning but without using force. Once you've recovered the device, the next 15-30 minutes will typically involve aggressive behaviour; shouting, physical aggression towards siblings, demands to have the device back and something not unlike Gollum desiring his Precious.
Based on my own experiences, adults can exhibit similar behaviour but extremes are dampened by conditioning, so harder to detect e.g it manifests itself in different ways e.g. sadness or depression instead of aggression.
My hypothesis for this is something like 'For every 15 minutes given to a medium capable of 'fully absorbing' human attention (books, computer games VR), 5 minutes of "unconscious recovery time" will be required to re-align the attention to the current "real" reality, during which subjects may display behaviour such as aggression, sadness or general distractedness / fidgeting'
This ratio of 15 to 5 might be different depending on the medium e.g. VR might have a more accentuated ratio than reading a book.
Why this is so I can't say for sure, but it's something like a tax on time spent existing in a disconnected reality vs. the "real reality" our bodies live in.
> The experiment you can try with most kids is give them a smartphone or iPad for 1-2 hours then take it away again with minimal warning but without using force. Once you've recovered the device, the next 15-30 minutes will typically involve aggressive behaviour; shouting, physical aggression towards siblings, demands to have the device back and something not unlike Gollum desiring his Precious.
Try the same with a book they show interest in, and you'll get the same behaviour. But nobody does that with a book because it's ridiculous, right? But so it is ridiculous to do that with an iPad or a personal computer! I'd say it's a pretty normal reaction of someone who was concentrated and fully engaged in an action, only to be unexpectedly and forcibly interrupred.
A simpler explanation to your experiences may simply be disappointment from having expectations unmet. If you were looking forward to a quiet date night without kids, only for them to suddenly come back home after being gone for just an hour, wouldn't you similarly feel such negative emotions as you adjusted to the reality of the situation?
Using a smartphone or a tablet computer for 2 hours straight will result in a negative physical condition so it is no wonder if the kids are cranky after that.
Also disrupting "flow" can make people cranky since its hard to attain that kind of a mindstate (a lot of work can go to waste if somebody interrupts you).
Anyway... I've seen kids playing Pokemon Go running around the neighborhood and the forests near by, and they seem like happy campers. It's good that there is at least something that makes kids play outside these days.
Seriously. Get me some fiber and a trainline into the city and it becomes feasible. Alternatively, hopefully I can live to become either rich, or retire comfortably to that countryside home.
Exactly. These are the symptoms of a withdrawal from escapism. You could replace "VR" in the article by many other kinds of absorbing experiences.
Not to discredit the author's own personal findings, it's probably a healthy thing to be self-aware of these feelings. And there might be something to VR that makes the contrast of detachment more intense.
Well in the author's opinion it's actually not the same. That's why he specifically points out counter examples of non-VR experiences which have similar but notably less intense effects.
It's still an opinion, sure, but the author did address this comparison.
Reading this I felt reminded of my experiences playing for Liverpool Action Role Playing. Being in character for several days and totally escaping get the outside world - then shedding the costume and sitting in a car on the motorway back home.
Well talk about post adventure depression.
Then walking up to the door of your longtime girlfriend and knowing get what was awaiting me - talk about remedy.
Escapism in the former of a holiday from reality might be great - but reality has it's own perks.
It's the intensity of the experience that will make VR the new hyper-addictive drug of choice for escaping reality in the near future.
I fully expect my children to be lamenting how their children won't want to come back to the physical (real) world - much like how we wanted our kids to get off the computer, and our parents didn't like us being on the telephone and watching TV.
I used to get that feeling to an extreme when exiting a movie theater. It had much more to do with being deeply unhappy than it had to do with movie theaters.
Sometimes I wonder if VR is building Plato's Cave or revealing more of the way out of it.
The more we learn about humans the more its clear our narratives and "real world" are at least partial figments of our imagination. We remember narratives that we choose to and ignore evidence to the contrary.
VR could help reveal this for people (somewhat the same as is claimed for hallucinogens). It could also allow us to increasingly choose to build fully artificial realities. Who wouldn't choose to be a god?
Interestingly, I find this somewhat similar to looking at landscape photography that people enjoy - especially from vacation destinations. Almost every picture now has more dynamic range, edge contrast, contrast, and saturation than the human eye experiences. This means people get to amazing places but are disappointed when reality doesn't match the photo. Then they use various apps on their smartphone to try to take a picture that matches the fantasy (often by erasing any of the local context or culture).
> It could also allow us to increasingly choose to build fully artificial realities.
Many works of science fiction as well as some forecasts by serious technologists and futurologists predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct. One thing that later generations might do with their super-powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their forebears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations. Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct). Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race. It is then possible to argue that, if this were the case, we would be rational to think that we are likely among the simulated minds rather than among the original biological ones. Therefore, if we don’t think that we are currently living in a computer simulation, we are not entitled to believe that we will have descendants who will run lots of such simulations of their forebears.
— Nick Bostrom, Are you living in a computer simulation?, 2003
> [...] predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct.
This bit is seems little bit strange to me in that it's actually not necessary at all[1]... a simulation runs on its "own timescale", i.e. it doesn't actually matter how fast/slowly the simulator runs -- the simulation still experiences time advancing at the proverbial dt/dt. This paragraph just seems to be scaremongering to the effect of "it'll happen soon because new processors!"
Regardless: If we're living in a simulation of such fidelity it doesn't really matter if it's "really real" or a simulation; our lives will still start and end inside the simulation. (And I daresay this whole thing is just a trivial rehashing of solipsism with an added tinge of technophilia. I really wish physicists had more interaction with philosophers.)
[1] I could imagine an argument for positing that e.g. Quantum Computing would be necessary, but the "enormous amounts of computing power" phrasing is incredibly vague, so who knows what the actual premise is?
The argument is that you are likely to be in a simulation, because most minds will be simulated minds. The precondition of most minds being simulated is massive computing power. If we can run a simulation but it requires half the world's computational resources and simulates one second per century of real time, then obviously most minds (and most moments of lived experience) would not be simulated.
> The precondition of most minds being simulated is massive computing power.
How so? I'm still not following the logic here. AFACS it does not matter how fast anything runs -- a simulation always proceeds a tick at a time. The simulated reality cannot (almost by definition) observe time at a smaller time scale.
The argument is that as a conscious being, your prior expectation of "where you are" should be a uniform distribution over all conscious beings. So the idea that you are "probably" in a simulation relies on the assumption that there will be more conscious beings inside simulations than in the top-level "real" universe.
> So the idea that you are "probably" in a simulation relies on the assumption that there will be more conscious beings inside simulations than in the top-level "real" universe.
I mean I can sort-of-see-it if this is the assumption, but the assumption itself seems quite circular to me.
EDIT: I also don't understand how this is connected to my point about speed-of-simulation, but...
Solipsism doesn't seem to quite fit. Like, sure, you're a brain in a jar in this scenario... but there are a lot of other brains sharing the jar with you, too. Solipsism inherently requires a singular existence rather than a communal one.
Ah, but as a brain-in-a-vat how could you distinguish other brains telling you things from the simulation just telling you what you want (or don't want) to hear? As long as we posit the "simulation" it doesn't really matter.
EDIT: Pithyness. Solipsism is fun, isn't it? :)
EDIT#2: I didn't mean to dismiss your point preemptively. I actually think it might be interesting to explore whether there could be (in principle) such a thing a shared-yet-simulated reality without succumbing to the solipsism argument. I don't think it's possible, but I'm not a philosopher. Incidentally physics has a similar problem. If you're interested, look up Boltzmann Brains and the "Arrow of Time".
> This means people get to amazing places but are disappointed when reality doesn't match the photo
Photographs with modern digital technology have many advantages over what our eyes can do, but I find it's typical the opposite problem of trying to make an image that adequately captures reality.
The advantage is that our brain can interpret the information from our eyes in real-time, meaning we can extract much more from a scene in real life. A photograph is just a snapshot with a pre-selected focal point, exposure, and view angle, and it can never reproduce the sensation of viewing something for real.
"Interestingly, I find this somewhat similar to looking at landscape photography that people enjoy - especially from vacation destinations. Almost every picture now has more dynamic range, edge contrast, contrast, and saturation than the human eye experiences. This means people get to amazing places but are disappointed when reality doesn't match the photo."
Strange, I always assume it's the other way round -- photos can't capture these amazing views. That's especially true in the mountains, where in photos it's usually "meh, just some rocks" while standing on the top of a mountain irl has all these amazing views and feelings that cannot be expressed easily otherwise. Though in a crowded, popular tourist destinations[0] your argument is closer to truth.
“Finishing a good book is like leaving a good friend.”
― William Feather
2) What is the author doing in actual reality that makes it so pale compared to VR?
It's interesting that the first example brought up is about interacting with a phone.
For god's sake man! Play a sport, have sex, go for a walk and smell the leaves, go for a swim in the ocean. Sweat, strain, climb and explore. Be an _animal_ because that's what we are!
Go and get barrelled on a wave in the ocean and then come back and tell me that VR is better. :-)
I've played a few of the leading titles on PSVR but then hit upon this simple puzzle game that has burrowed into my mind. I can't wait to get back to it, I lose hours to this game
People talk a lot about futuristic sex robots but what about VR experiences that are not only physical but deeply emotional - wherein you experience seduction and actually fall in love? Think about riding in a weeks long 18 hour a day RPG crusade with a Milla Jovovich lookalike Joan of Arc who, in between battles, is irreparably infatuated with you. The tech needed to achieve this level of total immersion may yet be decades away but once it arrives it's scary to imagine - love, not sex, being the real emotional Achilles tendon of the human experience.
Putting 3d models of people in VR is easy. Getting them to do anything interesting and not just be a few scripted things is much harder and very far from a solved problem.
Maybe that doesn't matter. Maybe all you need is the character to look you in the eyes. But I suspect most people would need more. Someone you can actually talk to. Not just pick multiple choice responses
So part of the product can involve hiring a random human to play the part of the love interest, with the VR putting an attractive face and voice on their actions. Heck, that person can even be another customer getting the exact same thing out of you, chosen because your google/facebook profile suggests your personalities are sufficiently compatible.
People do this already in Virtual Worlds. Although they typically meet in a social setting, there may well be matchmaking services that I just haven't heard of.
It's not "stereoscopic HMD" type VR - yet. There are projects (CtrlAltStudio, for one) working on that.
Take the answers from the human participant, make appropriate "mmhmm" noises, vary randomly around the center of the human participant's statements (in a space generated from the answers of other participants), and play back with continued eye contact and the face and body of high status persons.
I guarantee you could have that face ask for $5 for a ticket for next time and get it.
It depends on the degree, I guess. Maybe you don't need to have the character directly interact with you (the player), but just with your character? I developed a feelings of affection to video game characters once or twice in my life, and that was just thanks to good scripted dialogues and long, engaging storyline.
isn't this the same kind of territory currently being explored by Westworld? In Westworld instead of being VR it is actual reality (with robots) but the dilemmas are quite similar
Indeed, reciprocation/interactivity is not a requirement for obsessive love. See Dorothy Tennov's theory of "limerence". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerence
Looking at the "waifu" culture in Anime, it doesn't seem like you need a particularly deep or compelling experience. What you describe already happens; it just might start happening for a slightly broader array of people.
I would still rather have sex with real women, 18 hours a day. I'm sure VR porn will be big, but I don't think it will be possible to perfectly replicate sex without somehow directly intercepting signals to the brain. Standing there with a VR headset and some vibrating thing wrapped around my genitals will never compare to the real thing.
The few times I've tried VR I've had post-VR sadness, but mine was sadness because it totally failed to live up to the hype. I could see the pixels, for one, so I never forgot I was in VR. And the other thing is, as "magical" as those experiences are, they just don't measure up to real life. I've played virtual instruments and games and visited a VR villa and so on, but none of it was as magical as watching my kids do pretty much anything on a regular basis. I dunno, though, maybe I haven't tried the right thing in VR.
It's not that kids playing are engrossing or amazing or anything. Go watch someone else's kid play for six hours. You're obviously not going to get the same high, it's pretty boring, pretty quickly. A small amount of people will enjoy it.
Some chemical's going off in your brain, saying "WOW, my kids are AMAZING". It's a delusion that helps the human race carry on. How can you compete with a nature built in drug?
What you going to do for kicks in 10 years time when your kids are teenagers? The allure will have rubbed off by then.
This is very interesting to read. I personally had an experience that increased my anxiety by using the video app Whirligig. It has a cinema mode that puts you in a room, but off to the left there's just a dark, open space. After reading House of Leaves I found myself really creeped out by the dark, open void that existed to my left, and found that feeling followed me for several hours after leaving virtual reality. It seems like in VR it's very important to have control of your surroundings, because a game/app developer could easily cause trauma or scare people who aren't expecting it. The immersion and its effect on your subconscious is really shocking to people who haven't tried it.
Hah, I just finished House of Leaves based on a recommendation from a friend, and I totally understand. I didn't really enjoy the book, but it was so pervasively creepy I had a hard time reading it, and often felt extremely uncomfortable at home alone after a reading session.
Day 1 Vive owner here. This sounds pretty uncharacteristic of the experience and I guess this person has some psychological issues or is overplaying the VR experience for ad impressions. I read /r/vive religiously and no one seems to have this issue. Yes there's sometimes a "I wish I was playing now" but I've had that all my life and frankly it was 100x worse when I was playing MMOs or competitive shooters. This feeling isn't any different than the classic "I wish I was fishing" sentiment. We simply crave relaxing and rewarding experiences.
The only legitimate symptom I've heard of is some people, myself included, get VR dreams in the beginning, but they quickly go away. This has led me to the idea of making a VR lucid dreamer trainer considering dreams and VR environments have so much in common, but thus far not a lot of traction on my part especially in regards what game mechanics would help you achieve lucid dreams.
That said, I find most of the experiences fairly milquetoast with rare "Wow" moments which cannot be relived again. Unlike a typical skinner-box game, you really can't get wow'd over and over, but man, those initial wow's are incredible. I just flew in Freedom 7 in Alan Shepard's shoes last night in the beta for 'Go For Launch.' This had the real controls and the real audio in the mission. I didn't exactly weep, but it did affect me strongly on am emotional level, especially when I thought someone should ask Shepard to try this and tell us how realistic it is only to remember he passed away a while ago. I've been at work all day and haven't wished to be back in the capsule and I know if I do it again, it'll lose 90% of the magic. I may not ever play that mission again to be honest.
Savor the moments, guys. Don't pine to be constantly re-living the same stuff over and over in VR. It'll disappoint you in the end. VR is special in a way, but its not magical. It follows the same rules all other entertainment does. If you're finding yourself addicted then you've got a personal addiction issue. Its not the medium, its you. You probably need help at this point. Ask any ex-WoW addict how bad it can be and how it ruins lives. Seek out that help.
> This sounds pretty uncharacteristic of the experience and I guess this person has some psychological issues or is overplaying the VR experience for ad impressions.
> If you're finding yourself addicted then you've got a personal addiction issue. Its not the medium, its you.
The author gets many things right, such as the change in perception of distances. I get this from VR, but I also get it from changing from glasses to contact lenses (and vice versa). Doesn't sound like complete click-bait to me.
I do think it's an interesting point that the escapism VR offers is possibly equivalent to some dissociatives, and that it hasn't really being considered. Some people struggle with addiction to (plain) video games. Blaming the person isn't fair or helpful at all.
I clarified my position. This isn't a blame game. My point is to seek out the help because if you're experiencing this on this level, then you have a problem. Its not VR and its not normal.
Not too much different from people coming down from intense psychedelics or mystical experiences.
Among the spiritual seekers for these kinds of mindblowing experiences, there is a seeking for greater and more intense experiences. What follows is a sort of emptiness or depression. It's touching on dukkha, that is, existential anguish.
The key, as it has always been, to be present in the present moment, whether that means being present during the VR experience, or being present in meatspace. Being present to that emptiness will allow it to bleed out and dissolve.
I'm personally glad to hear about these reports. There is a good possibility that VR and AR is the gateway towards mainstream exploration of consciousness. Up until then, honest discussion about existential anguish has been buried and suppressed, and I don't think that has served our civilization well. Here's a shoutout to all the explorers to come.
Something I've noticed in many comments is its a mix of the game or story with perceptual warping.
My own perceptual warping story doesn't come with a game, but I assure you its super disorienting to spend a couple hours looking thru a low power binoc microscope to work on electronics and then just get up and walk around, your hand eye coordination is all messed up for awhile because what you see your hands do has been times 2 magnified and bent 90 degrees upward for some hours. Putting a key in a keyhole is a challenge for a couple minutes till reality snaps back. Its a form of sea sickness, after all. Your position sense doesn't match your optic sense and that makes some people puke although in low doses you just feel really weird.
Much like there is a difference between the taste of a beer in a relaxed setting vs after a long afternoon of yard work, your blood sugar or hormones or something distort your perception of the taste of the beer. Or DnD / pathfinder / rpg in general seems more fun when candle-lit. And a zillion observations in a hundred comments here about drugs or whatever.
I would think there are more technological opportunities to mix perception alteration with a story or game than just AI or what we've mentioned. Perhaps someone could scientifically calculate a formula to determine the correct music for a game. Maybe there is a type of food that naturally goes with social media use (probably something sugary). Maybe a certain hue of general room lighting is good for certain TV genres. Aside from VR technology, however cool it may be, I have this feeling narrative/game plus perception warping is a large mostly unexplored solution space.
I like to sail. I wonder if, along the lines of the theory above, liking sailing comes from ultra low dose perceptual warping due to subclinical sea sickness combined with the purely mechanical labor of sailing. Could you give me a small dose of anti-anti-sea sickness pills and I'd love basketweaving or something.
Can't the same be said about other forms of media? You go to the movies to escape, but on the drive home you feel sad that your life isn't as fantastical as the movies. Similar things can be said about the way we use our smartphones.
I'm sure after you have the time to become "normalized" to VR, the real world will seem less depressing. perhaps even refreshing.
Hm, never had a feeling like this at all. Been using VR since DK1, DK2, and CV1. At its current state, I think VR is really cool, and at times immersive, but it's just not immersive enough for me yet. I don't know about others, but the fact that I can see the peripheral edges of the lens breaks immersion for me most of the time. There are moments of immersion, but those are very rare. I tend to experience it in moments where I'm moving from an enclosed space to a very large open space (i.e. a tunnel in Half-Life 2 out to a city view). I think I will find VR very immersive when the lens are somehow able to wrap around your vision completely so that I can't see that I'm looking through goggles. Don't misunderstand me though, I think what we have now is incredibly cool and immersive. I did try the Vive controllers, and that really kicks up the immersion a whole lot. I'm waiting to buy the Oculus touch controllers.
I struggle to believe that this is a serious post, from someone who has seriously used VR. At the very least, I imagine their experience is very subjective.
I have the Oculus Rift, but have experienced nothing like what he's describing. Maybe its the lack of room scale, the lack of hand/arm interaction (Oculus Touch isn't out yet), or maybe I'm just playing different games?
Oculus never felt magical to me. In fact, if I'm being honest, it was kind of a let down. Yea it's cool, but the resolution is garbage (even in the production version I have). This article reads like someone who's never used VR, but worries about what it COULD do to you... if it really were great.
Have you used a vive? The resolution I don't think is any better, but the vive does feel magical to me. Everyone I put in it seems to feel similarly; but the tracked controllers are probably a big part of that immediately immersive experience
I haven't used a vive no. My guess is that the "magical" feel does indeed rely on your hands showing up in the game ("tracked controllers" as you put it).
Without that hand tracking, it's difficult to feel truly immersed in the world.
Having spent many hours in VR (Vive Room Scale) at a stretch, the article rings true to me. The biggest surprise being that it might not feel perfectly real at the time, but the memory is much closer.
The next generation of pixel density will make a huge difference IMO. I can comfortably work in VR with multiple desktops, but the resolution is tad too low.
You've got to up the text size or shorten the distance in VR to be comfortable, which is the annoying part I think will be solved in the next gen.
I get around this by adding multiple emulated displays (using Headless Ghost / Compulab Emulator) that are visible only in VR. Gives more room for window placement.
I'm used to working with 2-6 monitors on the desktop so it's natural for me to extend that into VR, but some people don't like the head movement needed.
I'm not sure "sadness" is the way I'd describe it, but returning back to the real world is a bit weird if you've been in for a few hours. I've always attributed it to the wind-down. The crazy part of onward is it literally invokes a prolonged adrenaline reaction. At least it used to, it's not nearly as much anymore. Leaving can be exhausting. It's definitely part of the addicting aspects. The first few times when I dove to the ground because I heard gunshots near me was exhilarating. I find myself wanting increasingly more intense moments.
I have been using and developing inside my Vive for about a month. It's only part time, so I am spending ~10 hours a week in VR.
I certainly get some of what the author is talking about in terms of that coming-out-of-the-matrix feeling: the tetris affect of my chaperone cage is strong, and objects feel weird to interact with, using the phone UI is kinda ridiculous.. however, I certainly don't think I am experiencing any type of postpartum sadness.
Roomscale VR is /ridiculously/ immersive. Every.single.person. I have put in omg and wtfs; even if they don't particularly care for video games.
I haven't experienced that effect myself, but i don't have a rig. I can't help but think of waking up from really intense dreams. Perhaps like those fever dreams when a little bit sick. My mind accepts the reality it's making up, and it's very intense. Perhaps fun, perhaps frightening as the generation drifts over to nightmare territory.
I understand what others are saying about books, but really vivid dreams seem like a closer match. You can't control a book, in a dream there's still some agency, some action that can change everything.
A lot of comments here mention this isn't unique to the VR medium. I would suggest that VR is fundamentally different than reading a good book or watching a great movie.
I would expect this is closer to when movies were first invented. There's a story (which may be untrue) of a movie which had a train heading towards the camera, and people running out of the theater thinking it was real.
I expect the feelings the author is exploring is in part experiencing a brand new medium. What I really like about this article is how the author isn't drawing conclusions, but rather saying this is an interesting phenom to investigate further. VR does provide extensions to fundamental human ability (I can only thing of the depression a disabled person would feel if they could move around virtually), and I would be interested to see if there's a fundamentally addictive quality to extending your interactions with reality.
I have this and have been dealing with a very similar effect to this for 4 months now. Depersonalization. It's a very odd type of depression and detachment from reality. It's very uncomfortable and can last indefinitely.
Mine was triggered roughly a year after I had been into VR and also a year after I moved away from home. It's hard to say which played a bigger role. It was triggered by my best friend coming to visit me.
It's fucking terrible. And I don't know what to do about it.
I wonder how much this has to do with vision correction. VR goggles, like TV screens, flatten everything into a single plane. If your eyes can focus on that plane they see everything. The real world is different. None of us have perfect vision at all distances simultaneously. We have to refocus when switching between near and far. The result is that nothing in the real world is every as 'in focus' as the VR world. So like wearing flippers while swimming, the real world is fuzzy and requires you to work harder than you did while wearing the device.
This is akin to why BBC documentaries always look better than the real thing. (I watched Planet Earth II last night). Those giant lenses in the fancy cameras can keep more objects in focus, allowing us to see both the parrot and the mountain background in ways we couldn't in the real world.
I've always been a bit concerned about VR being highly addictive, especially for people who want something to 'escape'. This seems to bolster this concern.
Of course people can and will get addicted to almost anything. VR may be healthier than heavy drinking, heroin, meth, etc.
Most of the more interesting VR control interfaces require enough movement to at least be healthier than, say, sitting at a desk and playing WoW all day.
> VR may be healthier than heavy drinking, heroin, meth, etc.
Honestly, I don't see why these activities are mutually exclusive.
I am much more concerned about the kinds of destructive power that people who are heavily-drunk, on heroin, or tweaking on meth, can now have inside of these head-mounted displays.
If you've ever had a dream where you can fly, VR can come close to that feeling of wonder and freedom. And like when you wake up in your bed, fully in the grip of gravity, coming out of VR can be a letdown.
Back in 1993, I used to hang out in an advanced VR lab of the time, with many options to try. Once I played Descent for 3 hours, with a shitty VFX-1 headgear.
It was hard to return back to reality after playing that game on a regular monitor, I can't imagine what it must been to play it with any type of vr headgear.
Some parts of this article make me think the author should seek therapy. I don't see why virtual reality couldn't trigger derealization disorder in susceptible individuals.
I have experienced this post VR depression with PSVR. Although I have to say that it has been happening less and less the more I play. Perhaps it's possible to become desensitized to VR. I've found myself becoming more aware of the fact that I'm in a game. I'm not saying the magic has completely wore off. I still experience moments of aw. Anyone else experiencing this?
Here's a fun thought that is really more of a science-fiction writing prompt: The author talks about his instinct to interact with the real world in the same way he interacted with the VR world. What if, as humans develop more and more realistic and immersive VR systems, it gives their bodies a real evolutionary incentive to develop telekinetic abilities?
There's a Stephen King novel called The Lawnmower Man that's basically this premise exactly. The film version is decent too and kind of fun in a 90s cyberpunk throwback sense too. Stay away from the sequels since as usual they are terrible.
> There's a Stephen King novel called The Lawnmower Man that's basically this premise exactly.
The Lawnmower Man I remember is just a short story and has nothing to do with VR or cyberspace at all. The movie doesn't have anything to do with the story. Like "I, Robot", it's a case where an existing unrelated screenplay had the name of a famous written work slapped on it to try to increase viewership.
Or, after they leave the VR experience, the people find they can still do the same things/have the same powers, leaving them questioning if they ever left. Kind of like what happens to Neo in the Matrix.
I'm concerned that AR will make this worse rather than better. The amount of dopamine that we will get from constant AR we glasses or contact lenses is going to be devastating. Just look at this artist rendition: https://vimeo.com/166807261
Is VR experience is expected to be something very new , I mean for example when u do something new like play a video game or sport you experience something new , is VR experience is something similar ? OR is it trying to mimic the natural behavior (like feeling of hitting the ball when playing a sport )
This isn't VR specific. I can get lost and immersed in any story regardless of the medium and be saddened afterwards. But, I will say that VR is one of the most immersive experiences out there. With the right game/universe, I can totally see people having withdrawal issues.
There's an answer to this in China. VR is becoming big in China, but not for games. For sales pitches. Right now, foreign real estate selling in VR is a real thing. Coming soon, "Alibaba is committed to making VR the premium shopping experience of the future".
I work at Mozilla VR on A-Frame (https://aframe.io). I talked to the Alibaba VR team in Hangzhou, and the top VR real estate project (iStaging).
They are obviously interested in eCommerce given TaoBao. I don't think Buy Plus went super well given it was targeting Cardboard. But they have stuff cooking with Vive and Magic Leap. Unfortunately, VR eCommerce is a hard problem. It's shiny-sounding, but it's difficult to provide actual value to consumers that isn't just hype.
And also VR hasn't entered mainstream China at all, not even for developers, so adoption is an issue. No one has space, and the VR cafes only attract super gamers.
iStaging created their WebVR viewer with A-Frame: https://aframe.io/blog/istaging/...this seems to be doing well given Cardboard is enough for this use case. 360 photos aren't really a compelling experience, but sufficient allowing clients to at least get a tiny feel for the place.
But the articles about VR becoming "big" in China, I am not sure about given visits there over the last couple years.
After playing Holopoint for 30 minutes, I felt a sense of elation and heightened perception. I felt like I could type faster, and my reaction times were faster. It reminded me of Lawnmower Man.
I didn't get this effect with less intense games like Space Pirate Trainer.
I know this is supposed to describe a problem but for me it has the opposite effect. I _want_ VR to be so immersive that the real world feels dull so I'm very stoked to give VR a go after reading this.
The Phase 1 effects remind me of the first time I got behind the wheel of a car immediately after playing GTA. I was barely able to drive because I was afraid of doing something stupid.
Jaron Lanier: Why people should pay more attention to me and not Web 2.0
When I noticed myself getting mean online I thought, “Something has gone terribly wrong.” It was obvious the rest of the ARPAnet had a social problem, not just me being some sort of asshole.
My book You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto is ruffling virtual feathers across the ARPAnet. And so it should, because I invented virtual reality. Wikipedia, which is a tissue of lies, says so. Prospect magazine’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals Poll lists me. Also, my hair is much better than yours. And I’m fifty. According to Wikipedia, so I’d better change my birthday.
Today, the web is a bland place. It’s all user-generated content — silly clips on YouTube, spiteful anonymous comments on blogs about my books, endless photographs of people at a bar with their friends or up a mountain with an ironing board. It was much better back in the early days of the ARPAnet, before we let the commercial users on. These words will mostly be read by numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. You know, the peasants. Virtual reality is far more ennobling, but you never hear people talking about that any more.
The ARPAnet only creates banal mashups of old culture. Salvagers picking over a garbage dump. Only the old-world economy of books, films and newspapers creates original content like Lawnmower Man or Battlefield Earth. Everyone knows that real artists have no influences. This stuff the kids are into these days is just noise!
The ARPAnet is also killing music, according to my good friends at the RIAA. Did you know there’s no music in Spain any more? It’s true!
Will we — meaning I — be able to live off our brains in the future, or will we just have to give our creative works away for free? If we can’t live off our brains then we’ll need a form of SOCIALISM just to survive. WIKIPEDIA IS COMMUNISM! Until the Wikipedia Corporation finally builds a good interface, for goggles and power-gloves.
Open source and open content are a cancer. The dogma I object to is composed of a set of interlocking beliefs and doesn’t have a generally accepted overarching name as yet, so I’m going to call it Digital MAOISM, which is COMMUNISM. Update, five years later: Here is a detailed retcon explanation of why I was not just trolling for headlines by calling Wikipedia COMMUNISM, but was speaking precisely and you just weren’t thinking hard enough: [snip 10,000 words]
Also, you should get into virtual reality more.
You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto is published on papyrus scroll and hand-illustrated by monks. You cannot have a copy until you have fought your way up the mountain and proven yourself worthy.
This is obviously a repugnant tactic that should be rejected with no hesitation and fought at every turn -- but it does kind of seem like the goal. Infinite VR pornography, sifted by neural nets to match every possible desire, a lifetime supply of Soylent, legal weed -- bam presto, you've solved the problem of all those people unemployed by the automation of the means of production.
I don't think this effect is specific to a medium. That it can happen with VR is a sign that the technology has matured.