Some days I wake up, have a cup of tea, bit of toast and then I go to Venezuela and visit the tallest waterfall in the world, or I go to a beach in thailand, or scuba diving inside the wreckage of a WW2 plane..and I even sometimes go into space. I actually go into space quite a lot. The first astronauts were obviously beyond excited at the thought of being amongst the stars but what they didn’t realise until they got up there was that the most breathtaking sight was not looking outwards but instead looking backwards and seeing our own planet. This life changing experience known as the ‘Overview effect’ is something I have done many many times over the last few months. How have I done all this? No, this has nothing to do with hallucinogenics. I have been inhabiting the wonderful world of virtual reality. I have been nowhere but have ‘visited’ more places than I have maybe done in my entire life.
The world is currently ‘closed for business’. Travel is off the menu. Being able to go to another country is virtually impossible at the moment but it is ‘virtually’ possible. And so whilst I wait for the real world to return I travel in VR. On the Occulus quest 2 (which is the headset we have) they have these 360 degrees immersive films and so at the click of a button you can suddenly be on the streets of Havana, swimming with sharks or skydiving over the alps. You feel like you are there because, just like in real life, you can look all around you. You are not fixed to one viewpoint. The other day I was in a panda enclosure in Japan just inches away from the adorable monochromatic bears and utterly immersed and then thought to look behind me and found a massive crowd of Japanese tourists taking pictures. And so I then started watching them. And that is exactly is what I would have done if I had been there . 360 gives you choice. 360 gives you peripheral vision just like IRL (in real life)
When I am at a gig I don’t always look at the band. I look around. I check out the crowd. I soak it all in and that is what you can do in VR. Unlike other visual mediums your viewpoint is not being dictated by someone else. The shots I have posted this week (screengrabs from the headset) do obviously not do justice to the experience whatsoever but here are a couple of clips just to give you a lil idea of what you can see, albeit within the confines of a frame that is not there if you watch in VR.
With the headset on you are not just observing, you are actually in it. You know it’s not real but your brain doesn’t. It responds as if you are present in that environment. It fills in the gaps. It connects the dots. It also does this in real life. I have quoted this stat several times before (cos I find it so mind-blowing) but your brain only gets 10% of its information from the optic nerve in your eye, the other 90% it is builds on the inside from information it already has simply because its quicker. Your brain is so fucking fast you don’t even realise it is doing it but what it effectively means is we are already living in a virtual world of our own making. So seeing life through a headset really isn’t that different.
I would obviously much rather be experiencing these things IRL but in the absence of it, this is something. I tend to ‘go to’ places of natural beauty and tranquility because it is the opposite of city living but you can pretty much go anywhere on Earth. In doing so you are transported beyond the confines of the walls that surround you. You get to see places you would never have ever gone to without ever leaving the comfort of your own home. You don’t need luggage. You don’t need to go through the hassle of airport hell and you don’t need to spend any money whatsoever on accommodation. You don’t even need to get dressed if you don’t want to. I actually ‘virtually travel mostly’ in my dressing gown. Why? Because I can.
The pandemic has proven one thing, we can live local lives. We can communicate and work via video if needsbe. It is maybe not 100% desirable but it is doable. What this enforced pause proved is what they said couldn’t ever possibly happen, happened. We all ground to a halt and life carried on. Maybe there will be a time again when travel is ok again but in the meantime we must learn to stay put. Previous generations barely left the town let alone the country they lived in their whole lives. And now the Brexit portcullis has come down, trotting round Europe, which was where most of us in the U.K travelled to, just ain’t gonna be as easy it once was. And if staycations aren’t your bag, maybe a virtual holiday will do the trick.
The reason I actually got the headset in the first place was so that I could hang out in cyber space with my brother and my nephew who both have one too. In the app Bigscreen you can ‘meet’ in an environment of your choice (lush living room, drive in cinema, mars) and interact as avatars. Within moments you feel like you are both in a shared space chatting away as if you were in the same room. It is way more connective than a phone call or a vid chat. You really get this sense that you are hanging out together.
It’s kinda nuts but once more the brain readily accepts it and you forget almost immediately you aren’t speaking to the actual person. Obvs it is not the same as being together IRL but it’s pretty damn decent. And during this period of isolation and separation it has proved invaluable. I have always been against tech if it got in the way of real life interaction but in some ways, this is an improvement because if you are talking to someone with a headset on you have their undivided attention. They aren’t distracted, they can’t look at their phone. It’s actually better.
The weirdest thing is when you take off the headset you feel like you are leaving the real world not the other way round. It is a bit of a headfuck tbh as the constructed digital world feels like an alternate realm of existence so immersive that when you are inside it you never think for a nanosecond you are actually in an environment that is made up of 0s and 1s. The longer you are in it the weirder it is when you return to reality because it feels less somewhat less engaging than what you have left. And we are just at the forefront of this technology. It is still a bit ‘blocky’ and there is sometimes a lil lag on the frame rate which can give you a bit of motion sickness but its only going to get better and better.
I have been charting the battle between digital living and the real world for years since smartphones became ubiquitous in our lives. I have seen reality slowly then rapidly lose its dominance for people’s attention and have had to acknowledge that since the world was shut down by this pesky spiky virus, the war is over. Digi won. Reality lost. So if you cant beat em, guess you might as well join em. When the real world returns as it once was it might not be so desirable to be in VR but I can’t imagine I’m ever going to get bored being in space.
Having said all that I have always been, and will always be of the opinion that there is no experience in the digi world that even comes close to its real life counterpart but as we need to drastically scale back flying around the planet in order to reduce carbon emissions. We must do this. We just cannot continue as we have been and so, VR might just be our salvation. It could be just the thing to help us wean ourselves off jetting across the globe at the drop of a hat.
If it significantly cut down aviation then all we would then need to do is cut down meat consumption and cut out fossil fuels and we can ensure that future gens have a liveable planet. Life will not only go on without these things, it will go on…which is more than it will do for our species if we don’t make these adjustments. Remember, not saving the planet, saving ourselves..
P.S You can also be a jedi and shoot zombies on this thing. Like fa real. Just sayin’
P.P.S I should mention this is not a plug, I ain’t getting paid to say this shit. Sadly not on the Occulus payroll but I bloody well should be.
