Is Virtual Reality Too Real?

I found myself at The Daden Virtual Campus in Unity Web Player thanks to a mail to a mailing list asking whether virtual reality is too real. This was my first visit to a virtual world in Unity, more on that later. However the reason I was there in the first place was due to the Daden July 2014 newsletter (PDF link), which talks about virtual reality. The news letter talks about the Daden Virtual Reality campus at the top but at the bottom moves on to virtual reality.

Virtual reality seems to be back in vogue, to some of us, it never really went away whereas to others, they are still waiting for the great leap forward when it arrives. However the Oculus Rift development, largely led by Facebook’s purchase of Oculus has made virtual reality a topic of discussion again. Whereas I still have very grave misgivings about Facebook’s purchase of Oculus, you can’t help but admire the way that Facebook’s name has helped to make virtual reality a newsworthy item once again.

So back to the mailing list, Dr Michael Vallance ponders :

One of the frustrations I constantly come up against at university conferences is the use of the term “virtual”. I have been involved developing and researching virtual worlds for the past 6 years so to me “virtual worlds” seem the most appropriate “meme”. It seems that the term virtual “reality” has baggage from previous attempts of similar technology. The older academics associate “Virtual” with “virtual reality” and consequently they deem that anything ‘virtual’ is an attempt to replicate “reality” complete with real-world physics such as gravity and form. To some computer science academics, if a development of a virtual space does not have real world replication then it is not virtual. They call it “artificial” which, to me, is incorrect. I argue that a virtual world can be a simulation and it can also be fantasy. It is not necessarily virtual “reality”.

The first thing I thought of when I read this was Gene Roddenberry Jr’s visit to Second Life back in the summer of 2009. Good grief was it really that long ago? As well as describing Second Life as a “cool cool area” and being impressed that there were furries present, he was also impressed by the physics defying fact that he could fly in Second Life. This is something I’ve seen mentioned before regarding virtual worlds, that the laws of physics do not apply, that they are indeed, very different from reality and how cool that is.

However here I realised that all of my thoughts are indeed about virtual worlds, the discussion is rarely about virtual reality, so I think Dr Vallance is onto something when he says that virtual worlds seems the more appropriate choice of words. This may seem a little pedantic but I definitely do think of these spaces as virtual worlds rather than virtual reality.

In many ways it’s a waste of opportunity to stick to the laws of real life physics in any virtual space, be it virtual worlds or virtual reality. This is part of the beauty of going virtual.

As for the Daden virtual campus itself, it has not yet been optimised so it’s an 88mb download. This reminded me of what Tony Parisi had been saying about people not wanting to download a much smaller web plugin for Vivaty. 88mb is certainly not massive, not for me in particular as I have pretty decent broadband, which was fully tested after I upgraded my PC to Windows 8.1 and then reinstalled World Of Warcraft and Diablo III from the Battle.Net site. Almost 50gb of data between them.

However the beauty of downloading the content for the Daden Virtual Campus is that there are no issues with waiting for things to rez. Movement is smooth and you can go for a first of third person view. Third person view is better for navigation whereas first person view is better if you want to look around, you can move the mouse around and pan around the environment in first person view.

There are definitely some missing features however, the main one for me was the lack of a snapshot option, print screen seemed to be the only way to get a shot. Whether this is a limitation of the Unity Web Player or the way the Daden campus has been designed I don’t know, I’m no expert in Unity. However I have heard rumours that Linden Lab’s new world may well be Unity based and it’s not hard to see why. The ability to deliver an experience to clients, the web and mobile certainly has great potential in terms of reach. However this is only rumour, I have no cold hard facts.

However how real is the experience? Well, when you walk in certain parts of the campus, pillars rise with small snippets of information, they sense your location. This would not really be feasible in reality, for a start health and safety would throw a wobbly. Then there would be people trying to vandalise it. The fact that there would be more than likely a number of people around would also probably throw such sensors and pillars into disarray, this isn’t a real life experience, it’s an experience however that utilises the tools available well.

Personally I don’t want virtual reality to be constrained by what’s physically possible in reality, that to me would be a waste. Virtual reality needs to suspend our belief, defy logic and whether it’s Second Life, Unity or the next big thing, it needs more Orcs, without Orcs, virtual reality is doomed, seriously, bring on the Orcs!

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