How Far Are We From Living Solely Through Virtual Reality
Before smartphones existed, the way we spent our time was much different. If you wanted to hangout with a friend, you would drive over to their house. If you wanted to meet a significant other, you would go on a date. If you were bored, you would read a book or play a game. And the list goes on and on. You may be thinking, “but I already do all those things.” That may be true, but ask yourself, is it through your smartphone? And if it isn’t through your smartphone, you probably don’t do it as much as you would have without a smartphone there to occupy your time.
Currently, smartphones take up a large portion of our time everyday. According to the measurement company Zenith, in 2019, American adults spent an average of 3 hours and 30 minutes a day using the mobile internet alone, and they expect this number to grow to over 4 hours in 2021. Also, according to Zenith, the overall time Americans spend on various mobile media is expected to grow to nearly 11 hours per day due to declines in other media types like TV and newspapers that are moving online.
We have apps on our phone to talk to and message friends. We have dating apps. We have thousands of books and games available on our phones whenever we want. We have social media apps, to show the world the perfect, polished side of us we want everyone to see.
We have all these activities available, within the palm of our hands. Is there ever a need to leave the house, or even get out of bed?
This is the case for work and schooling as well. Due to the pandemic, more people have been working or taking classes from home via laptops and computers. We have shown that we can do necessary everyday activities from the comfort of our own homes.
This has been possible because of new technologies that make working and learning from home easier; such as AR and VR technologies.
An AR software company called Spatial has changed the way people work from home. Spatial is a software platform that transforms any space you have into a 3D augmented reality workspace where participants can join from anywhere around the world. Spatial uses AR headsets to mimic a collaborative workspace where users can brainstorm and share content into one singular virtual space. Participants are represented by a 3D avatar of themselves and can pull up objects and content to share with the rest of the team. Co-creator Jinha Lee believes that all of us will be hanging out together in virtual 3D spaces like Spatial, within a couple years.
AR and VR: What’s the difference?
The terms AR and VR get thrown around a lot, and it’s oftentimes misleading. Virtual reality requires VR headsets that completely take over your vision, with the goal of making you feel that you’re somewhere else. Brands like Oculus and Sony create VR headsets to make users feel as though they are fully immersed in the virtual setting. Inside the headsets, LCD or OLED panels are refracted by the lenses to completely fill the player’s field of vision with whatever is being displayed. It can be a game, a 360-degree video, or just the virtual space of the platforms’ interfaces. Visually, users are taken to wherever the headset wants them to go — the outside world is replaced with a virtual one.
While virtual reality replaces your vision, augmented reality adds to it. Augmented reality lets you see everything in front of you, while projecting images over whatever you’re looking at. Examples of AR technology are games like Pokemon go, which uses your phone’s camera to track your surroundings and overlay additional information on top of it, on the screen, which in this case are the Pokemon. AR technology can also be found in headsets and glasses, where images and holograms are placed around you. To sum it up, VR replaces reality by “taking” you somewhere else, and AR adds to reality by projecting information on top of what you’re already seeing.
The world of AR and VR are constantly advancing. By 2030, IDTechEx predicts the augmented, virtual and mixed reality market to be over $30Bn. Advancements in VR include six-degrees-of-freedom tracking which tracks orientation and position; this lets it know where you are looking and where you are in a space. This is an upgrade from three-degrees-of-freedom tracking that just tracks orientation, and only knows where you are looking. This change has helped avoid collisions with real world objects while in the virtual world.
An even bigger advancement in VR is the emergence of full body haptic feedback suits. These suits let you touch and feel virtual reality. Companies like Teslasuit have created similar suits to those in the movie Ready Player One. The Teslasuit is a full body haptic feedback suit that can feel hot and cold temperatures, and people and objects hitting them within virtual reality.
Although there have been many advancements in AR and VR technologies, the technology still has a long way to go. Virtual reality spaces are usually limited to a small space to move around in, and for some the headsets get nauseating after a short amount of use. The more advanced VR systems are extremely expensive, so not everyone can experience VR the same way.
So what do smartphone usage and VR technologies have to do with one another? Basically everything we do, from communication to entertainment, is in our smartphones. How far away are we from a world in which we lived our lives solely through a virtual world. This may have seemed like a crazy question years ago, but now with advanced VR technology, is it really that crazy?
Movies like Ready Player One depict a future in which virtual reality is an entirely immersive virtual reality experience. What if we lived in a world where we all lived through a virtual reality setting, like that of the one in Ready Player One, minus all the car chases and epic battles.
The movie Surrogates gives a glimpse into a world in which everyone lives out their lives through robot surrogates that are connected to the host at home. These surrogates go to work, school, clubs, events, and basically do everything their host would do but with the comfort and safety from their own home, and the ability to look however they want. You can feel everything that this robot does, but without any worries of danger. What if we lived our lives through virtual surrogates in a fully immersive virtual reality world. Instead of controlling robots in the real world, we would control virtual versions of ourselves in a VR world. People would stay at home and hook up to their VR system and go to work and events through the VR world.
This idea of virtual surrogacy isn’t that far off. We basically have surrogate versions of ourselves on social media where we interact with one another. A virtual life is perfect and polished; it’s where you post your best pictures and share all your best news. So what if we could live through our virtual lives, with our virtual selves being our surrogates?
We already do so much through our smartphones and tablets; communicating, socializing, working, learning, gaming, shopping and so much more, so why not make it more interactive by allowing people to live in it.
Is this even possible?
The idea of virtual surrogates is one that seems straight out of a sci-fi movie, but in a couple years it could be possible. New VR technologies like the Teslasuit make the idea of an entirely immersive virtual reality experience closer than we think with users being able to feel what’s going on while inside the virtual reality world. A company Neurable has created a prototype VR headset where movement in the game is triggered by your brain. If this technology keeps advancing, people could maneuver in virtual reality without even moving in the real world.
There are a lot of factors today that could accelerate the adoption of this kind of reality. The first is the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic has led to large numbers of people staying home, which has accelerated our desire for new technologies that can mimic social interaction. As more people spend more time at home, many are turning to technology to fill voids of what they are missing. The pandemic is a perfect reason for adapting the fully virtual world. Covid-19 is most likely not the first pandemic we will see in our lifetimes, and many will feel safer living everyday life through virtual reality. Another factor is economic growth. Although the general economy has felt the burden of the pandemic, certain sectors, like technology, have been thriving. The market is generally an indicator of what industries will be of importance in the future. Technology’s stellar economic performance has proven itself as an integral part of our lives, and will continue to thrive for years to come. Also, generally speaking, each new generation starts with more capital goods and wealth, which allows for easier production and the opportunity for people to have more disposable income to spend on technology like VR.
You may ask, “How is this any different from VR we have now?” This new VR technology would connect the whole world on one server, to replicate a version of our world virtually. If the whole world switched to living through virtual surrogates, the server would have to support this large capacity. The fully immersive virtual reality experience would also have more advanced VR technology like higher resolution and use of advanced full body haptic feedback suits to add to the realism of the VR world.
A world in which this idea worked would require a large portion of the population to agree to make this change. Businesses would conduct work, and friends and family would make plans, via the VR world. You could connect with people from all over the globe, and truly experience what it would be like to feel their touch, without even having to leave your home. It would give people the opportunity to do things they would never do in real life. People could conquer their fears and feel their best self.
Imagine this. You’re a college student. You wake up and eat some breakfast, then put on your VR gear to head to class, virtually. After class ends, instead of texting your friends and scrolling through social media feeds, you and your friends decide to hang out in the virtual server. You can hug each other and enjoy the warm weather, even when in the real world it’s a gloomy, rainy day, and your friends are miles away.
There would obviously be many drastic changes to traditional business models, and everyday life as well. The change to living through an entirely immersive virtual reality world would hurt many industries like transportation services and entertainment venues. Transportation services would be used less, so airlines and other modes of transportation would have to come up with innovative ways to stay in business. Entertainment venues like bars and clubs would be vacant, due to everyone’s interactions being solely virtual through clubs and events in the VR world. Although there are drawbacks for some industries, there are opportunities to use this change to their advantage. Just as renting buildings costs money in the real world, it can also cost money in the virtual world. Club owners can make the change to buying a virtual club, and can charge people for entry. One of the industries that would benefit most from this change, besides the tech industry of course, is the media industry. Media companies would have the opportunity to put their content on VR platforms. Social media apps like Instagram and Facebook could use this trend as a way to change the format of their platform and make it even more interactive. They can also make even more of a profit selling customers data, since customers will be on their platforms for longer amounts of time. The data they sell can be made into ads that appear floating right in front of customers faces. There’s also the chance for the film industry to profit. Movies and shows can be made to be watched through VR, where viewers can feel like they are fully immersed in the setting.
Now obviously there are factors that still need to be addressed if we were to live our lives through virtual reality: Things like a need for exercise and nutrition, the fact that this equipment is extremely expensive, and most importantly, there are a lot of essential jobs in the real world like nurses and doctors, who as of right now, can’t do their jobs through VR. There’s also a lot of negative consequences that could come along with living our lives through VR that needs to be addressed. There’s an abundance of misleading information in the media that we are exposed to everyday. The information we see on social media platforms, like Facebook, is often skewed to one side of things, and can often be very misleading. If we were to go completely virtual, there is a higher chance we could be manipulated to a higher degree and become even more polarized as a country than we are right now. Also, there is the issue of one sole company owning this “virtual server”, which could cause issues of monopolism and authoritarian rule. There are also issues regarding the mass data collection that would occur if we were to live a large portion of our day through this virtual atmosphere. The government would need to enforce strict policies and regulations to ensure the privacy of our data and ensure ethical business practices.
The likelihood of a change to conducting everyday life through a virtual reality world is something that may or may not happen. We have increasingly become more attached to our phones, and do a majority of things through them. If we don’t end up switching to an entirely immersive virtual reality world, virtual reality will still be integrated into our lives in some capacity. We are constantly buying new versions of new technology and adapting it into our everyday lives, so maybe VR is the next technology that will become an integral part of everyone’s life.
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