In the land of the blind, the virtual reality genie will be king

The industry can’t afford ethical worries, writes

THE EYES HAVE IT: Palmer Luckey, creator of the Oculus Rift, demonstrates the new virtual reality headset

YOU might not have noticed, but this is the week it all began. When our cyborg descendants ask themselves how they ended up floating in personal nutrient tanks, their eyes replaced by 24/7 high-resolution data funnels, they will focus on March 28 2016: the day Facebook’s Oculus Rift virtual reality headset was released to the public.

Okay, maybe not. But there is a febrile, wild-eyed atmosphere in the tech industry right now because an idea that has wandered in the universe for 30 years is becoming viable.

Evangelists say millions of people will soon use VR to watch films together, share social spaces, learn surgery, or treat depression. Goldman Sachs thinks the VR market will be worth $80-billion by 2025, while game designer Jesse Schell predicts the technology will be blamed for at least one mass shooting by the end of 2017 and have 2.5 billion users by 2023. Let’s not even think about VR porn. Whoops — you already did.

But if the image of plugged-in people filled you with dystopian terror, there are a few reasons to doubt the speed and scale of this revolution.

One of them is cost. High-end headsets like the Rift or the HTC’s Vive cost £500 (R10 000) or more and require a powerful gaming computer. Most VR developers own such a computer, but most normal people don’t. Cheaper sets like Samsung’s Gear VR, which uses the more limited processor of a smartphone, will surely spread faster. But high-end developers mutter that these products could poison the well, convincing a generation of consumers that VR is full of poorly made gimmickry.

Another is funding. VR people get their money from venture capitalists and angel investors — not customers. Games companies, tech companies and theme park designers are flooding the VR economy with cash, and everyone is scrambling to catch it, to the extent that projects that initially had nothing to do with VR get redirected to include it. It’s an extreme version of “If you build it, they will come”. Which is fine, as long as they come.

Then there’s the psychological component. VR developers are sciencefiction nerds who grew up dreaming of a total escape into cyberspace. This technology is the fulfilment of a longheld fantasy. Conversely, the tech in- dustry is haunted by a folk nightmare of the big deal that got away: nobody wants to be the idiot who turned down a 5% stake in eBay or predicted a global market for “maybe five computers”.

These factors insulate the VR industry from the reality it will soon have to face. I’m not saying it’s a market bubble, and I’m not saying customers won’t want it (Apple has shown that sometimes people don’t know what they want). I’m just saying that customers aren’t yet all that relevant. The processes driving VR technology now are only weakly connected to the wider consumer market.

The corollary is that if you’re worried about what it might mean for our society for people to spend huge portions of their lives strapped into this immersive technology, playing, fighting and masturbating — well, too bad. Some developers worry about these things too, but the industry as a whole can’t afford to. Psychologists have research ethics; technologists just “release early, release often”.

On the bright side, most of the things VR will do to our brains and our lives are already happening. Avatars exploring fantasy worlds? I give you Second Life. Total, dangerous, addictive immersion? Internet cafe deaths are old news. Augmented reality? Download Uber, Citymapper and Google Maps onto your phone, book a flight to a city you’ve never explored, and find out just how little you need to see of it to find your way around.

VR will take these things further, as well as creating new experiences of its own. But its social, psychological and ideological effects will probably build on what the tech industry has already done to us. Maybe that fills your heart with joy; maybe it bores you; maybe it terrifies you to your core. I think I’ll take a little bit of each. — © The Daily Telegraph, London

On the bright side, most of what VR will do to our brains is already happening