Virtual Reality, as a commonly experienced world, has been spottily distributed and slow to be “adopted”. Like the early days of “Quicktime video in a postage stamp window” which eventually took decades to fulfill the promise of using online computers for all types of video, the technology involved with VR has been making gradual gains that have yet to reach that ubiquitous universal platform status.
Some day, the factors needed for full VR penetration into our lives will mature. With 5G on the horizon, and dramatic leaps in processing power with each new CPU for mobile devices, leaps ahead in tiny screen technology and miniaturization, as well as the continual build up of “server farms” and powerful Big Data algorithms…how far off is VR? We don’t know exactly, but the impact on our culture, and how we live, will be huge, and we might want to anticipate some of the coming changes to avoid being totally overwhelmed.
Sure, the kids born into VR will grow into the new place as a matter of course..but that will make them different than the rest of us who will be trying to “catch up”. We hope to help here at PSA with a series of posts on “A New Place” because, just as the Flipped Classroom works to adopt for education the permutation of video into all parts of our lives, learning and education will be moving ever farther into “A New Place” as VR matures.
This Axios article below talks about the sort of tech away-from-home-model, where “a new place” is some IRL facility one “goes to”…for a media immersion experience.
Which has echoes of both the movie theater, which is dramatically losing ground to the maturity of streaming “home theater”…and of the video game arcade, where “kids went in person” to experience the full state-of-the-art video game technology.
(That’s an interesting phrase “in Person”…which likely refers to aspects of VR that have been present in our civilization for a while now. Such as perhaps since the advent of the telegraph? When “in the cloud” today, are we there “in person”? Or are we in a new place with new personas, and avatars, and anonymous presences? More on this in later posts)
Personal mobile media has brought “home versions” (or anywhere a good WiFi connection exists) delivering streaming video game immersion in a cloud of users worldwide. Someday VR will create an even more dramatic disruption of our sense of geographic place, and usher in a simulacrum to the parallel universes that SciFi and bleeding edge physics have been talking about for some time now.
A parallel universe is a “New Place” to live in. While we’ve had foreshadowing experiences in such “new places” as Second Life; this will be much more unnerving and disruptive and transformative, perhaps transcendent too….when fully realized as “common-place” experience.
Total Recall offered vacations on Mars…this one seems to be mostly just earth…so far.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Fixed-virtual-reality-experiences-give-users-the-first-taste-of-new-technology-Axios.pdf”]