Why virtual reality ? - By Earth Primbee
I wrote this just over a year ago. Lets see how it sounds today..
Why Virtual Reality?
by Earth Primbee
April 2007
Many people, when faced with the current incarnations of virtual reality, ask several “why” questions.
Why do people trade full sensory input real world for a partial input virtual version?
We do it all the time. Every time we watch TV we trade our own existence for what we are watching. We react emotionally to what we are observing on a screen. We laugh, cry, fear, and cheer depending on what shows itself on that screen. Our visual and audio sensors are all that is being effected and yet we experience the full gambit of reactions. That’s why at the end of a movie people clap or say “wow that was really good”. The creators of that show/movie are so good at telling a story they broke us out of our own lives and caught us up in fantasy. Sometimes when the show/movie is not a fantasy we react even stronger and take real world action.
Science has said many times that the brain can barely tell the difference between what someone experiences watching TV, and the same situation in real life. This is why some people can’t watch scary movies. But what does all this matter? We all know too much TV can be a bad thing right? Studies show all kinds of problems related to children watching to much TV. I would venture to say the majority of those issues stem from passively observing whatever is brought across that screen. When your watching TV, your life is on hold. You are living vicariously through someone else’s experience. It is not activity generated by you, or likely even created by you. Though many shows/movies are based on real life events, most are total fantasy and you are just along for the ride.
Many suggest reading is a good activity. When we are reading we are only counting on one sensory input for our whole experience. Either using our eyes or ears, if our eyes don’t happen to work, we experience the world the writer has imagined. Again, we have no role in the process other than to follow along the path already established. I have no doubt that the imagination inspired by reading is highly profitable to the soul and mind. Having to create physical pictures in our minds as the story we are reading unfolds is creativity. This puts it a far sight above watching TV or movies.
I love to watch movies, and I love to read, I even love some of the shows I watch on TV. There is no doubt I enjoy all of these things. Many of us do. We have no problem, it seems, in using these things as entertainment and experience sharing devices. National publications and media outlets can even give us a sense of shared experience in the world, but they are still passive technologies.
Lets take all the visual input from movies/TV, all the audio input from music and then add onto it interaction with people. Interaction is something that movies, TV, books, and even music, cannot provide. This is the primary reason that I believe people seek out multiplayer virtual worlds. It takes all of the entertainment we are used to and presents it to us in a way we can interact with. We can decide the outcome of our entertainment. No longer at the mercy of a path already written, our minds are fully engaged and interacting with the story that is being created as we go. It is like the difference between thinking our lives are out of our control and all up to fate, and believing we create our own futures.
There is also no doubt that even with all this sensory input from our eye, ears, and emotions, it does not replace “real life” but it is a far better trade than simply watching a pre-determined experience. It is reality entertainment for the mind where you are making the reality rather than some producers or reality TV personalities.
If you take it a step further, and choose instead of making a fantasy, to create extensions of real life, you add another layer of living to your life. Rather than simply playing a game, or hunting orcs, you start using your own skills as a writer, graphic designer, movie maker, audio engineer, architect, furniture designer, fashion designer, you are no longer playing a game, but creating. Your entertainment , has become an active, engaged, mind compelling, addition to your real life. No longer taking you away from who you are, but helping you express your creativity in ways never before possible.
Right now, if I want, I can shoot a movie with my camera. Edit it on my laptop, add music recorded by a friend’s band, stick it on my website, invite 40 of my friends from all over the world, and have a showing of that film that they can all watch from their computers, and yet still be present next to me in the theater. The same goes for artists who want to see their fans when they play. Current technologies like myspace and youtube are the rage for artists trying reach out to fans. The latest editions of virtual reality like Second Life, allow you to present your creativity to the world and then sit side by side with those who witness it and have a discussion about it.
You are no longer limited by physical location in the world, access to media outlets, a physical space to play/display, or international borders. The world is right there waiting to see what you have to present and they can even be in front of you when you do it.
Why do people seek to escape from the “real” world and engage in a fantasy?
I grew up with four things in my face, television, music, family, and nature. Most of my early cognitive years were spent living in the country outside of a small town. There was a huge forest behind my house. I remember many days of lurking through the forest pretending I was Indiana Jones, GI Joe, King Arthur, Buck Rogers, and many other heroes. It feels great to be a hero even if it is pretend, and I was very much into pretending.
I learned at an early age to “suspend disbelief” while watching the television. It was a natural progression from my adventures outside. After all, the TV introduced me to people and places I’d never seen, and many I would never see in my lifetime. The line of experience between real and fantasy was so blurred by my activities in the forest and what I felt watching TV, that I was easily able to create my own world of adventure. I would act out parts outside or create adventures with my toys inside. Many adults marveled at my ability to be quiet and entertain myself as a child.
I do remember an interesting effect from the shows like A-Team and GI-Joe. Whenever conflicts took place, even those involving guns, no one ever died. The pilots always ejected safely, and the A-Team just knocked people out. I was heartbroken the first time someone actually said they killed my main GI-Joe during a battle we’d setup. It sounds silly, but my brain didn’t want to accept that armed conflict = death. Movies and TV shows I saw as I grew older told me all to well what armed conflict brings. Blood spattered bodies piled up over and over and over and over and over.
Around the age of 17 I was understanding the real world we have created so fast I barely saw a reason to live at all. Gone was the “fantasy” of growing up in the sunshine with everyone looking after everyone else. Gone was the “fantasy” that life was a “local” experience made up of my friends and family. Gone was the belief that we were all in this human existence together. Gone was the belief that leaders in the world had the best of intentions. Gone was every sense of what I thought life was going to be like when I got older. The “fantasy” I’d grown up to believe was reality was proved completely false.
My parents divorced when I was 12. I understand why now as an adult, but then I was wrapped in my little version of what life had been up to that point. Everyone I’d met, talked with, shared adventures with, and loved was suddenly torn from my reality as my Mom and I moved to another state to start a new life with her new husband. I don’t blame her or my Dad for what happened. Without it I’d never have met my wife or likely even have the kind of existence I do now. Still, it had effects on me. I had to completely start over.
I had to reach out to strangers in this new town, try to make friends and somehow re-establish the social network on which my whole life had been built up to that point. That wouldn’t be the last time I lost all of my friends and had to make new ones. It is no wonder I seem extremely skilled at communicating with strangers on a personal level. It is also no wonder that I have some difficulty in letting guard down in terms of believing people I love will always be there.
So, here I was 17, totally lost on what reality was or why it was even worth it. I’d started over life again in a new town that eventually became my home. I looked around at the people in my school and saw much of the same depressing behavior I saw in the world. I saw people trying to carve out niches for themselves in a small scale social setting (high school) rather than embracing everyone as worthy of attention and respect. I saw fights over who was for or against racial discrimination. I saw lonely souls desperate for attention mocked and made fun of by what represented “high society” in school. They say “stay in school” but I wasn’t so sure. Learning is great, but the trappings of mankind’s attempts to create a social order thus far, quickly became a farce in my mind.
I rebelled against what was “reality” and chose instead to make my own. After all, look at the world, what great tragedies play out in our attempts to force our realities on others. I started hanging out with creative people. Those who either rejected the current social order as fantasy, or simply rejected reality all together. In those people I found an acceptance I’ll never forget. For the first time in my life I was celebrated simply for who I was, not who I was going to be, or who I knew, or what sport I played, or what the price tag on my clothing was when I bought it. I was just me.
This magic place I’d found was a nightclub downtown, where I would go on to learn how to entertain people by making light look like the sound of music. Sure it was partly a bar and had the usual problems. Yet, it was also a brother/sisterhood of people whose only goal was to enjoy music, dancing, and each other for who they were. This was my first serious life lesson. In complete rejection of the reality imposed on me, I found true existence. Creating and enjoying the creativity of others without the normal outside self imposed fears.
It was not long before I found computer worlds. I spent a long time interacting with the creations of others rather than people. I did develop amazing hand eye coordination and reflexes, but zero social abilities. My desire to understand the world outside seemed to shrink the further I sank into these solitary simulations.
I was out of work for a few months and in addition to looking for a job everyday, I’d found a new form of entertainment. The massive multiplayer online role playing game or MMORPG. All of the sudden instead of simply sitting at my computer, isolated from society, I was connected to thousands of people from all over the world. Existing in a social setting much like that of a small town, I quickly made friends with many people.
People with all sorts of backgrounds from all sorts of social settings found themselves face to face with each other though they were thousands of miles apart. Suddenly all my creativity from the adventures I’d made as a child, was valuable again. All the times I’d pretended to be this or that for entertainment was happening all over again. I laugh as I think of the childish creative imagining that was raining all around me during that time. Suddenly drama class was making a whole lot more sense.
Although I have always found it challenging to pretend to be someone other than myself, it is a highly entertaining activity for a whole part of our economy. Those actors and actresses we so love to read about and pay millions to go see act out stories don’t have any problems pretending to be other people. Why should they be the only ones who get to have that kind of fun? We can all do it. Ask any good actor what they love about acting, and I think you’ll hear a very similar story to those who love to act out fantasies in virtual reality.
What is so great about virtual reality anyway?
The connection. Plain and simple the most valuable part of virtual reality is its insistence that we are not our physical bodies but a highly advanced intelligence that exists wherever it chooses to go. Fantasy and reality are totally dependent on the conditions that exist in your life. Take the view of America in the eyes of those who hate it. To me America still holds the promise of one of the best social experiments in the world. To others it is a hive of evil to be destroyed. I think reality means genocide is wrong, but others in the world think it is just fine. Who’s right? Well I think I am, but so do they.
What I do know is, when I sit on my beach in the world of Second Life and someone walks up to me and says hello. I don’t think about what country they are from, what color their skin is, what their political affiliations are, how much money they have, I am simply encountering another being. We can sit and have a chat about life and true meaning though they may be living on the other side of the world. There is no filter between them and I. No borders, no passports, no airplane ride, no jetlag, no traffic, no taxies, no hotel rooms, just the time it took them to teleport to my beach and walk up to me connected us together.
We are listening to the same music, and if I turn on the movie screen, watching the same movie. We share this entertainment experience and perhaps even gain valuable insight into ourselves by interacting with people from cultures foreign from our own. We don’t think of race or creed or color, just communicating what we are thinking.
I find that very refreshing.
If we are ever going to work things out and collaborate for the benefit of all mankind, it seems to make sense that we discover ways to collaborate that transcend physical boundaries. Ways that enable us to share our creativity directly with the rest of the world. There is no replacement for the experience of physically being somewhere that’s true. Yet in a world as large and expensive to travel in as ours, we limit ourselves in the people we can learn from, teach, or entertain, by sticking only to those we can physically reach out and touch.
I am extremely lucky after my life to have found the wonderful group of friends I have in reality. I am blessed with being surrounded by very intelligent and passionate people. If I had to guess though I’d say maybe 40% of the world at best, could say the same thing. I’d be willing to bet a lot that the majority of the world finds themselves isolated in their own lives and unable to reach out to others for a variety of reasons.
Just in my own experience in virtual reality I feel like I’ve been able to have a substantial impact of the creativity of people from all over the world. Inspiring them to search themselves for that spark of wonder they forgot as a child. Helping them to break out of the shells their real lives have encased them in. This is the virtual reality I see. It is a wonderful place of creativity. An island of understanding surrounded by an ocean of real life oppression and discrimination.
Some say I am ahead of my time. Some say I am crazy. Some say I am a prophet. I say I am simply a man trying to grasp what true reality is. When we are all made of matter that is mostly empty space and everything we see and touch is made of millions of billions of trillions of atoms that are also empty space, and all spinning in a giant symphony of movement on a scale so grand our own galaxy is smaller than a pinhead in terms of the world, you tell me what reality means. I say most of us are living a complete fantasy in our own lives.
Virtual reality is not the savior of mankind by any means. It is as dangerous as any technology we create. It can however, connect us to the rest of the world in a way no other technology can. It can unite us and encourage us to overcome stereotypes. Most importantly, it picks the mind up off the floor of passive entertainment, unites it with others engaged in creating entertainment that everyone can enjoy in real time.
That’s a bit of why I so passionately pursue creating in virtual reality. I see countless other things, and have made many outstanding observations concerning the truth of real life while present in virtual reality. Most of all I see the potential it has to make distances, handicaps, finances, and other boundaries to creativity and worldwide social interaction meaningless.
To each his own though for sure 
