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VR - More Impressions

6 years ago2,297 words

After playing around some more with my Oculus Rift, I'm amazed at the potential VR has to explore the nature of our perceptions... but I also wish I could just give up on the real world and live in a variety of virtual ones instead.

I've spent much of the past couple of days using my Oculus Rift to oh-so-excitingly stare at interminable loading or downloading screens... but I've also had the privilege of some moments where I've been able to play around with the things I've downloaded. It's been quite a journey so far, though I feel I've only just begun. I've definitely had some much more immersive experiences than I wrote about in my previous post, and I've been playing around with making my own VR content too, with some easy success.

The first palpably immersive experience I had was in a simple demo that came with the Rift, which had a series of brief vignettes demonstrating the range of worlds you could potentially explore. A simple low-poly style nature scene; standing in front of an inquisitive alien on another world as its ship hovered close by; standing in a museum corridor as a T-Rex approached me and roared in my face; and, most notably by far, standing on a ledge atop a skyscraper in a steampunkish cityscape at night. The latter was the first time that my body reacted strongly to the experience (with something other than motion sickness, anyway); I felt as if I were truly standing high above a street below, and I felt a drop in my stomach, an animal instinct to escape. Thrill and awe and terror and arousal. I don't mean sexual arousal, I mean what it's called when your awareness is raised, your heart races, you begin to sweat. Your sympathetic nervous system activates. The fight or flight response. That it's activated so intensely by these artificial experience is a testament to how real they feel.

After that, I went on a space walk as an astronaut of the International Space Station, in a free app by the BBC (called Home). Gods, that was absolutely terrifying. I've always assumed that if I ever got the chance to fly in the sky or even between the stars, I'd find it immensely liberating, invigorating... This, though, this feeling as if I truly were emerging from a hatch into the inky void and climbing my way around this fragile, labyrinthine clump of technology hanging silently, directionlessly in absolutely nothing beside the looming Earth, which served as a distant wall but not at all as a floor... This feeling was anything but liberating. I felt scared. My palms were wet with sweat, my legs began to shake. I had to keep reminding myself that I was safe, that this was a simulation, but it felt like an inner battle against my animal instincts that were telling me to just flee. I was dislodged from my moorings by debris, and died in space. I didn't try again.

I've also been finding it interesting how visual perception alone is responsible for much of the body's reactions to stimuli. I had an experience where I was up to my neck in virtual water... and I felt my chest tighten slightly, my breath get ready to be held. I felt lighter, but compressed, like I could begin to float or swim, and I felt the threat of impending drowning if I went just a bit further. I had only the visual input to go on, but I still felt as if I were actually submerged. A minor thing, but interesting to me as a psychologist-to-maybe-be.

Overall though, wow again. In my previous post, I wondered whether VR might just be a gimmick, quickly forgotten once the novelty wore off, like the Wii... But now I think that this has infinitely more potential. It's not like I didn't 'know' everything I know now before I tried this Rift, but 'knowing' something in some cerebral, intellectual way, and feeling it viscerally, are worlds apart. And after feeling like I truly was in other worlds, I felt like I now finally own the sort of portal I've always hoped might come in my lifetime. I've dreamed all my life of visiting other worlds - probably because I feel so ill at ease in this one - but there were always limitations, like physics, an apparent lack of alien life, cost, everything else. VR seems like the best way to escape the confines of our mundane lives and explore worlds limited only by the imagination and skills of whatever creative people make them... But now that I've got this in my life, I'm finding it even harder to care about the real life I'm supposed to be primarily concerned with.

I've been consistently having suicidal thoughts for a long time now, as I've written about many times before. Every day I wonder if it'll be my last, and I see no hope in my future, I have nothing really to live for. People have suggested reasons I might go on, but they feel meaningless to me because I've been so horrendously unsuccessful when it comes to finding meaningful relationships, which I feel is the most important thing in the world, the only thing truly worth living for. The thought of being stuck in some mundane life I hate, alone, seemed infinitely worse than death, and I wanted to not have to face that. I don't see how I could ever get a job, since I've never had one and my social skills are apparently abysmal... Plus I have a brain tumour. Many reasons to die.

VR makes me not want to die. But it doesn't exactly make me want to 'live', either. At least not in this world. I'm currently in the university's halls of residence, alone; everyone else has gone home for Christmas. I don't plan to, and I'll spend this social holiday here alone, by myself, as I have for the past two years. This sounds sad, but it suits me just fine. In fact, I wish I could extend this period for several weeks, months even, put the world on hold while I hole myself away in this little room, escaping via this portal into worlds made by others, or even by myself. I've got an exam, an assignment, and a dissertation draft due shortly after Christmas, and I've yet to start preparing for any of them... I really don't want to. I just want to escape into this Rift.

I've also explored one of my 3D Unity projects in VR: ∞ this thing ∞. That was surreal. Being able to see my own human characters standing before me, actual size. I've thought and written a lot before about choices made when designing the proportions of fictional characters' body parts, and how they affect our perceptions of their humanness or personality; whether enlarged heads seem cute or creepy, for example. These fairly basic 3D models' proportions were humanish but with overly large heads, which created a deeply uncanny effect that made me feel sort of sick looking at them. I shrunk their heads to normal size, though, and they look 'fine' now in the VR world but weird and gangly on the small screen. Odd, how that works. Odd that they do look 'fine' despite having a cartoony style to them; I'm unsure whether I register them as other humans despite their deviations from the actual human appearance, or whether I'm just used to them and know what they are because I made them, and... hmm, I suppose this is more interesting to me than it would be to anyone else, though.

But since I'm able to technically make, explore, and even populate my own worlds in VR, that makes me want to just learn the skills to build my own personal paradise, to fulfill my own needs through creative building, as I've been trying to for a few years now. I obviously can't make things work for me in the real world, so maybe this is my only hope of anything resembling happiness? Hmm.

I also tried a couple of other VR experiences by other people. One was a simple flight simulator called 'Aircar', where you fly a flying car thing through a dark city. Again, I felt like I was palpably there; my body reacted as if I really were flying a small vehicle through the rainy night, through this cyber city. It was thrilling. My stomach dropped as I looked around the cabin then out of the windows, down at the drop below. I almost threw up as I reluctantly but curiously did a loop-de-loop. It's like I've got a theme park in my bedroom, except better because I've got limitless time and complete control and choice.

The other was a thing called Robo Recall, which is one of the free games that comes with the Rift. I won't be surprised if it's well-known and highly-praised, though I'd never heard of it before because I live in a bubble. In it, you shoot robots. I don't exactly like shooty action games - I've spent much of my life actively disliking FPS as a genre, and "I hate guns" - but it really did get the blood boiling. The adrenaline flowing. My legs ached afterwards, I was covered in sweat. I fell over my poorly-placed chair dodging bullets and got up immediately to grab a robot behind me and throw it into a couple of others. I'm probably not very good at this kind of game compared to people who'd actually like them, but even despite how unsuitable it is for me and I am for it, I was still amazed by how fluid and exciting it all felt. I was actually having fun. Perhaps it's something action gamers feel all the time, but it's rare for me, and makes me eager to get back to it - and similar experiences - tomorrow.

A final thing that I want to comment about is the sensation of embodiment, which is of interest to psychologists in the field that my dissertation happens to be in; I had to do a presentation a couple of weeks ago about something called the rubber hand illusion (look it up if you're not familiar with it; it's fascinating!), and how it works even if the artificial hand belongs to a robot. While doing research for that, I read some things about how VR experiences can create a feeling of embodiment with a variety of avatars, and this can shape people's real attitudes towards others; white people who embody a black avatar scored lower on a test of implicit racism afterwards, and prisoners who'd been violent against women demonstrated much greater empathy after they'd had a VR experience where their avatar was female, for example.

While this means that VR embodiment has an interesting degree of 'ecological validity' by taming the evil, personally I just find it fascinating as a way to essentially live many lives, at least briefly, through this one. Maybe this is an odd way of putting it, but I've always wondered what it'd be like to look down at my own chest and see a fulsome pair of peachy melons jutting jigglesomely forth from it. Not in a body dysmorphic, transgendered way or anything, but just because there's a degree of frustration in knowing that I'll never truly know what it's like to live life from that 'opposite' perspective. I also don't know what it's like to be fat or black or wheelchair-bound or anything... Or a bear or a dragon or a robot. But VR offers the potential to have some idea what it's like to have these different bodies, and that might give some small glimpse into what it's like to have their accompanying minds, too, maybe. Perhaps it's the best way to generate true empathy rather than mere sympathy.

Though none of the experiences (I hesitate to call them all 'games') I've had by proper developers had any embodiment beyond a pair of floating hands, I did test it with my own little 3D world, positioning myself so then I could see through my characters' eyes, and it really did feel when I looked down at their body as if it belonged to me (it was particularly interesting how ineffably different the feelings when viewing 'my' breasts were compared to viewing them from another's eyes). The effect would have been stronger if I'd been able to move the body parts, or if the pose matched mine at least, so it's a shame that's not really possible with the Rift alone just yet. Perhaps it won't be long before it is, though. That's something to look forward to.

So it's a mixed bag of feelings that have arisen from the expensive decision to buy this what I feel is more than a mere toy. It makes me want to delay suicide... but not necessarily in a way that I imagine other people would admire me for. It's also sad that I don't have anyone to share the experience with - which is why I'm having to write about it here instead - so I wonder whether that will get to me when the novelty fades. Or who knows, maybe I'll meet people through it? There's all sorts of potential it could bring.

Again, my thoughts aren't especially coherent here, but I'm trying to write out feelings as I have them, as I go along, for my own personal interest if not anybody else's! In case it isn't obvious though, I'd readily recommend VR to anyone and everyone, and I really do think it could change my world, if not the world.