Why the real promise of virtual reality is to change human connection
Rubin is a journalist at Wired and the author of Future Presence: How Virtual Reality Is Changing Human Connection, Intimacy, and the Limits of Ordinary Life, out today from HarperCollins. The Verge spoke to Rubin about VR intimacy, its social powers and downsides, and why VR porn is surprisingly quaint
Jaron Lanier, who famously popularized the term “virtual reality” and was one of the early pioneers of VR as a consumer idea, called it “the conversion moment,” or when people start believing in the virtual reality world they’re in. Your rational brain always knows that stuff is outside the headset, but the reptilian brain doesn’t. That unlocks everything we talk about in the book.
I can almost guarantee you that a cocktail party in VR is invariably more fun and more rewarding than a cocktail party in real life, and maybe that would be my answer: let’s go do this in VR.
To bring up Jaron Lanier again, I once asked him the very best thing he could imagine in VR, and what he said was, “Performance artists who, rather than creating art, they create reality and they do it in real time.”
I bring that up as an example of a thing that doesn’t have a precedent. There’s a role for AI in this, too.
See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/17/17242326/virtual-reality-vr-peter-rubin-future-presence