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Some parts are really engaging. That one is finally using arms and hands and posture and rotations—not mere button presses—to manipulate a virtual world makes t
by crdrost 6y ago
Some parts are really engaging. That one is finally using arms and hands and posture and rotations—not mere button presses—to manipulate a virtual world makes that world much more intimate. Simply the freedom to move your attention around the world is powerful; this has been a staple of come theaters and planetariums and in some ways headsets are just an attempt to virtualize that so that you don't have to sell people a whole projection room.
Other parts are downright dangerous. Apparently the headset being close to your eyes causes pupils to involuntarily dilate right as you are shining a bright light into them, creating really nasty eye strain problems for VR game developers and presumably later for their customers. Addictive behaviors are almost certainly more addictive in VR; this is why casinos create their noisy everyone-is-out-here-winning illusions in real life; one can only imagine the damage that VR gambling and pornography could do.
I am still waiting for a resurgence of arcades with the introduction of something like powered exoskeletons. These are being developed for military and mechanical contractor use, where you want to give people the ability to lift things and stuff, but transducers are often bidirectional and going the other direction, that ability to provide force-feedback can be used to suspend someone basically in air and give them a considerable amount of control of their environment: you are in a airplane cockpit, and it really shakes like an airplane cockpit. Playing VR games now, everybody laughs about how you we're trying to bend down and pick up a gun, but you accidentally grabbed Phil’s foot on the coffee table. Relatively amateurish. But that sort of pod exoskeleton could be used to go for a virtual run—no, not on this planet: on the moon.