It’s late. Moonlight bathes the hills with just enough light to see, fading into fog in the distance. I’m floating half a meter off the ground, sitting cross-legged and staring past my reflection in the mirror. Lost in silent contemplation. Rain pours around me. I’m completely alone. A somber piano piece fills the air, coming from everywhere and nowhere.
This is one of my absolute favorite places. It’s so kind to the senses. Soft. Quiet. Subdued.
Except for the pressure on my cheek. And the weight on my face.
It took me so much energy to put this thing on. It’s not that bad. But I’m older and spontaneity doesn’t come like it used to. Friction tolerance has shrunk as I’ve atrophied from untreated aging.
It’s moments like these where I yearn for VR that is as easy to enter as closing one’s eyes.
VR is in kind of a weird spot right now. The early hype days are well and truly gone at this point. Abrash’s ‘these are the good old days’ assertion was 8 years ago, if you can believe that.
The Gartner hype cycle calls this point the ‘trough of disillusionment.’ But VR’s kind of a different beast. Things have come a long way, and disillusionment and trough don’t really describe a place where the fantastic has been becoming ever more real.
Where I really am is not the trough of disillusionment, but rather I’m sitting in the valley of the shadow of dreams.
And I’m not disillusioned. Anything but. The vibe has surely shifted, but I’ve spent these past 9 years building interactive virtuality, inhabiting ever more comfortable forms, going to places serene and fantastic in ways I’d never thought possible, and getting communicative glimpses into the minds of people far more capable, beautiful, and complex than I. This technology has both delighted and distressed, warping my sense of time, space, and self into shapes not possible before. I can never be as limited as I was in the before times.
What I am right now is dissociated, not disillusioned.
The complex lifepaths of at least tens of millions of people have spiraled forward to make this current state. VR has more than proven itself. This… thing… whatever it is and what it’s becoming, is far past the point of fading away. It’s a part of the human condition now.
So then why this feeling? What is it that makes this feel like such a liminal valley?
I suspect part of it is the nature of the valley. Despite the hard tech advancing so much, and the possibility space of the experiences within technically being infinite, the current tech, like all tech, has affordances which will warp the topology of the manifold of possibility. Regions of this space will be easier or harder to travel to or build out due to what the current tech makes easy or hard. And the distribution of what is valuable to human agents is not even either. Also, these two concerns are not perfectly congruent. Things reside here that have immense human value are possible to reach in principle, but the terrain makes them arduous to reach, or conversely there are regions which are easier to reach that are not as compelling. With great effort I can build something that is rich and engaging, with deep utilization of and hooks into, the bodymind, taking full advantage of eye, body, and hand tracking. But then tradeoffs appear, as my favorite and best engine for exploring this virtual realm doesn’t afford that. I’d have to carve my own path and leave the worlds, bodies, and friends behind to do that visitation, to realize that value and experience. In a totally different trade off I could use standalone VR gear that is more convenient but means giving up visual fidelity and processing power, and many cherished forms. I’m forever grateful for getting even this far, but even so, the tradeoffs are still there.
The biggest driver of this sense of being at the bottom of a valley, of being in VR’s local minimum, is simply that for folks who are proximate to or similar to me, the space where the affordances and value converge has been mostly explored. Each minute has been wondrous, but the remaining vistas are shrinking. Bounds starting to become visible in the fog that previously looked like wide open skies.
Like all liminalities though, there is another side. The next generation has officially begun. The Quest 3 is out, bringing a slice of the higher end experience to more people. My daily driver, the Varjo Aero, with its extraordinarily clear visual experience but rather uncomfortable face pressure and neck lever will soon give way to a Bigscreen Beyond, which by all evidence should be a massive improvement. The current paradigm will evolve slightly to allow for staying longer, getting more done, and enabling more exploration. The forces of the market are driving innovation in input technologies which will give way to greater interactivity. And others tirelessly toil away on various other innovations, which will make exploring the possibility space even easier in other ways. And so it goes, the law of accelerating returns reliably pushing the frontier out, over and over again in the great technocapital cycle, powered by the human hunger for ever greater things.
The hunger for greater things may be at its most intense with VR. Of all the sectors in modern technology, only BCI is more intimately and directly connected to the human bodymind. The first time one tries on a VR headset, the traditional modality of windows, icons and even 3d renderings on screens is sharply revealed for the impoverished experience it is by the fresh flood of new connection of perspective correct stereopsis, fast refresh rate, and 6dof controller tracking. It’s qualitatively and categorically different, and that first joy has an afterglow that can last a while. But before long, the bodymind wants more. You’ll notice the individual polygons on people’s faces, or the rigidness of clothes that don’t flow, or the fact that bodies simply pass through each other. In the physical world, when one touches a dear friend on the shoulder, the soft tissue of the body is compliant, slightly pinching inwards at the contact point, varying with the pressure gradient. Not so in VR. Spend long enough with someone in your lap and you’ll get eyestrain from the fixed focal distance of the headset. You can’t focus on something that close for long. And yet with stereopsis, things in the near field are the most compelling, and that’s before taking into account that it’s just nice to lay down next to someone for an hour or so. Spend long enough in these virtual worlds and you’ll notice that objects rarely make sounds as they touch, bounce, and slide off things. People don’t make sounds as they shuffle around. Normally in the physical world as someone moves their arms around their jackets will make soft crumpling and sliding sounds, their boots will impact on the ground when they step or shift their weight. People leaning on things will cause them to slide and tilt. Sitting on a couch or bed will cause a ‘pomf.’ We’re still in the era where most objects have colliders that don’t accurately represent their shape, and if you pick them up and drop them in mid air they stop there, floating without any inertia whatsoever. There’s a long way to go until you can grab a tree branch, bend it and feel it push against your hands as the tension rises, watch flecks of bark and splinters pop, until finally it fractures into bits both tiny and small that bounce off the ground and leave imprints on the grass. Or until you can feel the rain on your face and wind through your hair. Which I will say, would be perfect for the place I’m currently in.
A quick look at the most common experiences in VR shows this tech and tooling affordance effect. What do we see the most of? Cozy hangout rooms. Vibe based scenes. Bars, nightclubs, and the occasional shooting game or a social game with simple rules. Cards against humanity clones. Every possible variation of werewolf or Murder in the Dark. Is this really all that VR can do and be? Is this a limitation of creativity? Of course not. There’s no shortage of passion, creativity, or industriousness among developers. Many of these worlds are extremely good at a handful of focused elements. Some of these worlds are absolutely beautiful, or their core premise for a social game is engaging and fun.
This is mostly all we see because it’s what the tools and tech currently afford. Going well beyond this at present requires skill that would get someone whisked away to a traditional game studio or big tech co, and time effort that will only pay for itself in the most miraculous of conditions.
To really fill the fidelity hunger of the human bodymind in the long run, totally new approaches are going to be needed. Simulation first, instead of crafting first, but still retaining the ability to deeply hand-craft. Workflows will need to be re-imagined for the medium itself. VR is still mostly built on flat screens, code-scrolls, and in 2d scene views. To go beyond, VR must bootstrap itself, using VR to make VR. People in VR must be able to build new virtual materials and dimensions, map one set of senses to another, and use hands, eyes, and bodies in an intricate dance to bend the very fabric of the virtual, and have that virtual be the storage medium of prosthetic memory. All with affordances, virtual tutors, and fellow travelers that make the process unfold as naturally as playing a game. We’re going to need a lot of design.
More people are coming. More products and tools are in the works. The wheels are turning, but they won’t spin up instantly. Inertia is a funny thing. The valley might even look deceptively long, as the new explorers start from square 1 again causing them to take some time to start seeing the current limits. But once their contributions hit, and the advanced tech leaves the lab and hits the market, up the slope of enlightenment we’ll go. And the world will start to see what those of us who live here have known for a long time.
So here I wait. On this hill in a rainy graveyard, in my surreal umbral pocket universe, unable to warp into the future. While it may feel like an eternity in subjective time, like every exponential, in retrospect it will pass in the blink of an eye. Everyone will be able to have what I have here. Their own sensory perfection, wrapped in pure aesthetics like a safety blanket from childhood, transformed into a digital dream, recharging before the next great social, personal, spatial, and morphological adventure. Except theirs won’t hurt their face and will be as easily accessible as closing your eyes.
