It’s come a long way since the late ‘80s/early ’90s, when … for a weeks’ rent money … you could spend three minutes feeling dizzy, motion-sick and then, just as the virtual world around you finally caught up with where you were trying to go 179 seconds previously, learn that it was GAME OVER.
But I can’t help feeling that it still suffers from the same fundamental problems it did way back when: it’s trying to cram in everything, whether it’s appropriate or not to do so.
“Usability does not equal recreating real world paradigms in computer user interfaces” — Tuomo Valkonen
There are plenty of areas in which VR can excel, so long as fully immersive, realistic replication of the entire gamut of experience is not shoehorned in. Motion such that there is an isomorphic relationship between our IRL movements and our VR experience is not one of them, however.
If I want a physical workout as well as an experience, there’s no VR experience that can capture the thrill of a horde of space-orcs unexpectedly pouring out of the bakery across the road in my home town thanks to my go-anywhere AR glasses.
Or … if I’m after something a bit less strenuous, I can go to the Helen Keller Museum.
VR can’t recreate this, because the environment in which we experience the action … no matter how immersive … is artificial even if only inasmuch as it is temporally bounded — it exists only so long as I wear the headset/goggles/whatever. Moreover, even without a score and incidental music cuing me for the next event/encounter, the very fact that I am in a dingy street (or wherever) is a dead giveaway that something is about to happen — see my observations re gaming tropes here. It’s still a move, not real.
Outside, in the real world, however, AR comes into its own. Without the need for fancy gadgets, expensive harnesses or a reverse gear, if I’m about to get overwhelmed by the horde then I can run as fast as my legs will take me, for as long as my stamina holds out. And, furthermore, unlike in the VR world, which is limited to the storage capacity of the system, events needn’t take place in a manner in which … despite everyone’s best efforts … they will, perforce, be signposted to anyone with even a mere couple of years’ experience of film/gaming — they can happen anywhere, anywhen, without warning, without signposting.
Instead of trying to make it do things it just isn’t suited to, I think it would be better if it were made to excel at what it actually excels at (first person POV porn ¹ ) and left the action sequences to AR, IRL — the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle seems to have been forgotten (or else never to have made it as far as the Marketing Department in the first place).
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¹ Or whatever 😉
