Reality Check

Why Virtual Reality is Just as Real as the Real World

“It’s not real! Why would I want to spend time in a virtual world?” — Common response when describing VR to non-tech folks

Although virtual reality has taken the gaming and tech worlds by storm, the majority of people still can’t fathom why anyone would want to strap on a virtual reality headset. They think it looks dorky. They think there’s nothing worthwhile to do. And most importantly, they think it’s not real.

It’s easy for those of us immersed in the VR community to get caught up in the hype machine. We know that virtual reality will allow us to go anywhere, with anyone, and do anything we can imagine. But for many people, virtual reality has an almost sinister edge to it. They picture the Matrix — millions of people trapped in a virtual world never experiencing the real one.

Because we totally don’t do that already. Image courtesy of Hans G Bäckman

In the VR community, we understand that this is a false dichotomy. Not only will most people not be consumed by virtual reality, but VR is just the next step in a long evolution of human-computer interaction. We already spend much of our lives in digital realms, we just call them Facebook, Netflix, and email. Still, the idea of an entirely virtual reality can be off-putting for those with an ingrained idea about what is real and what is not.

If we want virtual reality to be a truly global phenomenon then we have to change the conversation. It can’t just be about fighting virtual dragons or exploring the solar system — as awesome as that sounds to those of us that already accept the virtual. Instead, we have to show people that the virtual world can be just as real as, well, the real world.

A (Brief) History of Reality

The distinction between real and virtual is a relatively modern one. In ancient times, myths and legends were not just stories but part of intrinsic beliefs. People saw ghosts, talked to spirits, and received prophecies from the gods. And these were more than just superstitions for people — they thought these encounters were as real as a mountain or tree. It wasn’t just that they thought they experienced the spirit world. In their mind, they really did.

These days we have the benefit of modern psychology and neuroscience to explain why people see things that aren’t real. Psychologists Dr. Richard Wiseman and Dr. Neil Dagnall have spent their careers exploring why people experience things they perceive to be paranormal. They’ve found that the number one common factor between people that have experienced paranormal activity is that they believed in the metaphysical prior to the event.

In ancient times most people grew up believing in the spirit world. If they saw something unusual then of course their first explanation would be supernatural. Because they considered the paranormal to be real, it made these events real in their mind. It took us until the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution before we began to differentiate between reality and fantasy.

Then again, some of us are still questioning.

At the same time, humans have a long history of constructing worlds we knew weren’t real but wanted to experience, namely fiction. For most of human history, these were stories told first by word of mouth and then through books. Still, these worlds were only as real as our imaginations. But with the advent of film in the late 19th century, we could finally put images to these stories, radically changing how we experienced fictional worlds forever.

During one of the first film screenings people fled the image of an oncoming train, showing how easily easily fooled people were into believing the moving pictures were reality. Although these days we might not run from the theater during the latest Michael Bay flick, we still talk about movie and TV characters as if they were real. We will cry when a favorite character is killed off and smile when two characters mary — even though none of these events ever actually happen.

In the past forty years the line between real and non-real has become even more blurred. With the advent of personal computing and especially the graphical user interface, much of our lives has increasingly become digital. We have accepted email, apps, and internet browsers as stand-ins for forms of communication that used to happen in the real world. We’re really just interacting with electrons and photons but in our minds we’re working, socializing, learning and playing in digital environments.

“Oh yeah, I’m totally a level 100 Paladin!”

The basic premise is that much of our lives is already “virtual” and has been for thousands of years. Humans have come to accept a wide variety of experiences that aren’t technically as real as talking to someone face-to-face because of the benefits they bring to our lives. In these non-real worlds we can tell fantastical stories, explain the world around us, and communicate with people around the globe in ways that we never could if we were limited by our physical surroundings. Virtual reality is just the next evolution of this virtual interaction, but the unique properties of virtual reality will eliminate the limits of the physical world once and for all.

The Quantity of Data

I first began to believe in the power of virtual reality after watching the incredibly prescient talk given by Michael Abrash at the January 2014 Steam Dev Days conference called “What Virtual Reality Could, Should, and Almost Certainly Will be Within Two Years.”

(Quick sidenote: Yes, you read that right — he said two years from January 2014. Even with all the crazy changes in the VR industry in the intervening years, he still hit the timeframe pretty much right on the head. Everyone should check it out to see just how eerily accurate most of his predictions have become.)

In the talk he lays out the key reason why everyone in the world should care about virtual reality. It all comes down to one word — presence. If you’ve ever spent more than five minutes with a VR enthusiast you already know that presence is the phenomenon that occurs when your brain believes on a fundamental level that a virtual reality experience is real. It’s an idea that we’ve almost begun to take for granted in the VR industry but it’s the reason why virtual reality is unlike any previous technological revolution.

The reason why the VR industry is taking off now and not five or ten years ago is that we finally have hardware that can mimic the way our brain perceives reality. Our eyes and vestibular systems are simply biological machines that can take in and process information at a certain rate. Now that we have VR headsets that can reproduce information at the same rate or higher, we can manipulate and change that information in order to change how we perceive reality.

“I’m perceiving the world’s largest burrito!” Image courtesy of Maurizio Pesce

That’s why virtual reality and presence are game changers. They don’t just present us with a virtual world like books, TV, or computers did. They mimic the way we perceive the real world.

The virtual reality anime classic Sword Art Online gets it spot on when describing the difference between virtual reality and reality as, “The quantity of data. That’s all.” Of course over the next few years graphics will get better and we’ll (hopefully) add haptics allowing us to touch virtual objects, but all of that is simply adding data to our virtual worlds. Now that we have tricked the brain into believing that a virtual world is real, the difference between the virtual world and the real world simply comes down to the amount of information we perceive.

Changing People’s Perspective

Although no one is denying that the transition to virtual reality will be jarring for some, developers need to present it to the public in a way they can understand. While “Virtual Reality” can conjure scary, dystopian images in many people’s minds, it really is just another advanced digital communication and media device.

People are already used to using their iPhones to communicate with each other. Virtual reality only enhances communication by allowing for a more immersive, interactive experience. Rather than sending a text or even making a FaceTime call, we can talk to each other as if we’re face-to-face. Rather than diminishing the amount of human interaction we have, virtual reality makes our digital communications all the more real.

People are already used to watching movies and TV shows about fictional characters. Virtual reality allows them to become a part of these stories. Right now, most media is consumed passively. Virtual reality will allow us to interact with media in entirely new ways. Already virtual reality short films like Wild: The Experience and Henry allow for simple interaction that makes the stories come to life.

People are already used to seeing pictures and videos of places far away and long ago. Virtual reality allows people to visit these locations and create their own experiences there. We are no longer limited to looking through someone’s Facebook photo albums of their trip to Guatemala — now we can be there through a 360 video. Not only that, but virtual reality will allow us to explore places that only existed in our imagination or on screen. We can travel to Middle Earth or ancient Rome or the farthest reaches of the galaxy simply by putting on a virtual reality headset.

Or a world entirely made of butts!

By framing virtual reality within the experiences that people already know, we can help encourage the mainstream adoption of a technology that will radically change our lives for the better. In the end, virtual reality is very real — it just allows for a lot more possibilities of what reality can be.