Is virtual reality our reality?
You probably heard of VR, maybe AR, probably not MR! Respectively, they stand for virtual reality, augmented reality, and merged reality. In a brutal sense, you must’ve only heard of virtual reality (VR) if you’re a gamer or medical professional. VR is the most commonly used of the three “realities” utilized in today’s world, especially around first-world countries' workforces. While VR is mainly present in the video game industry, not for designing products, it is rather a way to consume them. From the past half-decade, VR has grown ever-so-slightly thanks to innovative companies such as Oculus and now Valve with their own VR systems (Rift and Index respectively) and introducing the concept of virtual reality games at an “affordable price.” I’ve personally owned both the Oculus Rift and Valve Index. Both systems demonstrate the accessibility, affordability, and innovation behind the market.
Despite its solely recognized popularity in video games, it’s actually used in healthcare a lot. In fact, the usage of VR in the medical field is not brand new at all, not even used for surgeries as one might guess but for therapy mostly. A fantastic example of medical usage with the VR platform is treating phantom pain in amputee patients. Therapists use VR sensors connected to nerve inputs from the brain to make patients play a game where they use a virtual limb, which helps deducts where they feel false limb pain. Even automotive industries use virtual reality to simulate their car designs, a big pioneer of this would be Ford. This helps Ford accelerate their production without waiting for physical prototypes to conduct quality assurance testing on them.
This sounds all wonderful, but with all of these real-world examples, is the idea of virtual reality taking over our reality — a reality? The bigger question to that is, is it evolution to our current way of life?
While for the past decade, we’ve written out it in dystopian novels or seen it in sci-fi movies, predicting such a VR revolution occurring in the far future; however, that far-future has retconned to our dark future, with COVID-19.
COVID-19 has isolated us to our bedrooms, and humans are a social animal. Thus the two situations can’t compute. But what does compute are computers, which allow us to communicate globally to anyone from the comfort of our sanitized homes. What the computer also does, is allow us to play games, VR games included. One indispensable game to this is “VRChat.’ As the name implies, you chat with other digital humans in multiple instances (virtual worlds). VRChat allows users to become close with their friends and family and even closer thanks to the game's VR system support. From your mouth to your individual fingers, VRChat ensures you’re able to socialize like normal…well, digitally at least.
The result of COVID-19 and the ensuing lockdowns has pushed the demand for VR accessibility, with many more applications and games taking forth to market off that demand, all and all to transform our reality into a virtual one. In fact, online retailers, such as Amazon, allow you to use AR (augmented reality) to view how the item physically looks in your house, with the proper sizing and look. So you don’t need to go to the store to look at it in person. This coaxes consumers to turn towards Amazon’s services, even when they want to see the product in person. Best part? It’s all done through your smartphone.
The longer COVID-19 lockdowns go on, the more our reality truly becomes virtual. A virtual reality that can be monetized or easily controlled by the “game masters” themselves. Whether this is a good future or not, it all depends on how we will literally play it out.
