This seems painfully obvious and yet is rarely considered
beyond the rooms where software and hardware peeps building these things. The sizzle is the emotional space the
interface puts you in, not the steak that gets you there, so that—the
recreation of reality—is what gets put forward. Additionally, there are so few interface hardware products
out there that the differences between them are relatively small. When we finally have a range of
hardware products to choose from that extends from a used Toyota to a Bentley,
then we’ll see more discussion of VR as a GUI in the public sphere.
Historical context in order to demystify the product called
VR
So just briefly, let me historically contextualize computer
interfaces and photographic imagery.
Computer interfaces
I’m old enough and was exposed young enough that I remember
when computers didn’t have monitors.
You typed your program onto punch cards, fed the program into the card
reader, which in turn created a spool of yellow paper tape with holes punched
in it, which was then fed into the computer, which ran the program and printed
a result on giant green and white paper.
Then came monochrome monitors, then color, blah, blah, blah all the way
up to where we are today—VR goggles—the latest computer interface. And one thing that hardware can do with
the right graphical user interface (GUI) is fool the brain’s senses of sight
and sound into believing it is somewhere other than where it is in reality.
But if you are not trying to fool the brain, you don’t need
goggles. Goggles (which will become glasses) to recreate reality are just one
possible use of a 360, 3D space projected in front of your eyes and very
quickly will become your just your portable system. Your home system will be much different. How about a curved display you bring in
front of you on a reticulated arm?
Photography
There is a focus on recreating reality with this product at
the moment because it is a new image-based media. It was the same when photography was invented, then movie
projection, then television. All
were pitched as devices that made the viewer feel more like there were “there”,
in reality. But people very
quickly adjusted to those media as only representations of reality (it didn’t
take long for audiences to figure out the train was not going to come out of
the movie screen and run over them—but they did at first). The same will happen with “virtual
reality”. As it does the market
for this new GUI will grow.
The best thing to do is not call binocular vision GUI VR at
all, although unfortunately that ship may have sailed. In part, that is a result of VR being
taken up by gamers in the 90’s when it was abandoned by everyone else. Of course, and rightly so, the gamers
wanted a more “real” experience and one of the possibilities of this new GUI was
to expand the experience of being “in a place”. That has gotten us to where we are now, but the end game
here is not the replication of reality, but the development of a new interface
between humans and computers. The
recreation of reality is just one possibility of this new interface.
360 3D display
Owning a home computer was once nerdy territory and working
with them was a frustrating experience even for those who knew how to deal with
them. Who would want that in their
home? But you could play games on
them. Now everyone has a computer
as a phone in their pocket and many seem lost without one. People say the same about VR
goggles—uncomfortable, nerdy, difficult to work with. The way out of that moment is to stop focusing on the
recreation of reality and begin thinking of possibilities of new interactions
with the machines we build.
Getting stuck in the recreation of reality trap creates a
limited bandwidth of possibility for this new tech and should be avoided.
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