Nine Nights in Azeroth, Chapter 2: Virtual is Real

Chapters: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5

Remember when Virtual Reality strapped on the dual engines of Johnny Mnemonic and Disclosure and jumped the shark?

“We’re all doing [virtual reality], every time we look at a screen. We have been for decades now. We just do it. We didn’t need the goggles, the gloves. It just happened. VR was an even more specific way we had of telling us where we were going. Without scaring us too much, right?”

William Gibson, Spook Country

In its heyday as a topic of speculation, the problems of virtual reality (in the futuristic, helmet-and-gloves sense) seemed superficially to be technological. Binocular optic displays never worked particularly well. The consumer-level technology of tracking objects in space wasn’t really up to the task of dealing with anything like an articulated glove as a controller (let alone two). And interfaces such as treadmill-like walking surfaces were pure fantasy from a pragmatic perspective. For the most part these facts are still true.

But what occurred to me as I learned the ropes of navigating my character around Azeroth was that technology aside, the fundamental benefits of classically conceived, first-person VR were questionable. When I accidentally zoomed my view into full first person perspective, my instinct was to roll right back out again. Much more comfortable to play from a perspective a yard or two behind and above my character’s head. Fumbling around trying to manipulate physical objects seems more like a bug than a feature of physical reality. And isn’t pressing a button or twitching a mouse so much easier than actually walking around?

The fact is that the ideas behind most of the gimmicky contrivances of “Sci-Fi” VR are rooted in the assumption that the path to a more immersive virtual experience is to pursue an experience that most closely mimics actual presence. So you use your feet to walk, your hands to pick things up, and you move your head to look around. In reality, the only thing that delivers this authentic experience is being there. If anything, dodgy optic displays and clunky glove manipulators could only accentuate the unreality of the virtual experience.

On the other hand, we’re incredibly used to looking at moving pictures and increasingly comfortable manipulating things in them with devices like the mouse and the video game controller. Our real, after all, is already virtual: a model our brain constructs from sensory input. The brain is comfortable treating adequately modeled realities as real. The secret, mainly, is not getting in its way too much. Provided the the images are compelling and sufficiently realistic and the interface is smooth and not unnecessarily complicated, we can quite comfortably inhabit a small, two-dimensional visual world with mediocre stereo audio. And therein enjoy effects in the realm where true immersion occurs: not the technological, but the psychological. At least until the shooting pains in the wrist tendons start.