The appeal of an inferior virtual reality

[This essay from The Baffler does a nice job describing the sense of presence people experience in virtual reality despite the relatively low perceptual realism the medium provides, and arguing that the worse our reality gets, the more appealing an escape into even a perceptually inferior virtual one becomes. This is only an abridged version of the much longer essay – see the original for more observations, including on the history of VR. See also an apparently related essay in MIXED, in which the author argues that “VR games like Gorilla Tag, Yeeps, and I am Cat seem like the future of VR gaming.” –Matthew]

[Image: Credit: © Derek Zheng]

Worlds on a Wire

Virtual reality still searches for a purpose

By Gabriel Winslow-Yost
October 2024, no. 76

“Virtual reality” is an oxymoron, of course. That was one of the criticisms of the term back in the 1980s, when the question of what to call the slightly ludicrous assemblages of head-mounted screens and sensors then being developed, and the experience of being in an illusory space they were designed to provide, was still up for debate. “Artificial reality” was more popular for a while—when the New York Times ran a front-page story on the technology in 1989, it was headlined “For Artificial Reality, Wear a Computer”—though that term is no less contradictory. Ted Nelson, who had coined “hypertext” a couple decades earlier, proposed “virtuality”; others preferred “cyberspace,” which was not yet solely associated with the internet. (It would be some time before my favorite alternative, “phantomatics,” coined by Polish author Stanisław Lem in the early 1960s while speculating about the possibility of such technology, made its way into English.) But in the end, which is to say by sometime in the early 1990s, “virtual reality” prevailed.

Incoherence, it turns out, has made the term more apt, not less. VR itself is an oxymoronic technology. Using it, you encounter a new form of contradiction: between presence and appearance. Nothing in VR ever looks real—in fact, most things look pretty terrible. Textures are a little muddier than you’d expect, 3-D models a little blockier, animations a little less smooth, video footage a little less sharp. There’s an implicit Law of VR Inferiority when it comes to graphics: because everything in VR has to be rendered twice, once for each eye, those things will always look worse than they would in non-VR. No matter where you find yourself in the arms race of computer graphics—the decades-long slog to conquer reflections, water, shadows, facial expressions, and all the other problem areas of reality—to move from the screen to the headset is to regress technologically. A Valve Index plugged into a high-end gaming PC will look worse than if you used that same PC with a normal monitor; a PSVR headset plugged into a PlayStation 4 will look worse than just using that same PS4; and so on. And yet the trick of strapping screens and sensors to your face works, all the same. Those unimpressive, clearly fake digital objects feel like they really are there, present in the same space as your actual body: that pixelated, stiffly animated whale really is looming over you; those jagged, blurry rats really are scurrying around you; you really are soaring over that flat, low-res approximation of the ground. They are present, somehow, for all their obvious unreality.

In a way, then, VR is more impressive the less convincing it looks. The older and more primitive iterations make this most apparent. It’s not your eyes that are being fooled, in the usual way of special effects and video games, but something else, some deeper intuition about your surroundings. This can actually be quite irritating. Mediocre or outdated programs retain an effectiveness that feels unearned, overpowered. I remember playing Until Dawn: Rush of Blood a few years ago—a fairly generic horror rail shooter released in 2016 for the PSVR—and becoming increasingly angry at how viscerally unnerving its cheesy evil clowns and lazy jump scares were. None of it was original or impressive or actually unsettling, but those clowns were, nonetheless, behind me.

Just as often, though, it feels like a strange little miracle: to find yourself having an authentic encounter with a poor imitation, truly standing in the presence of the unreal. This is why video recordings of VR are so unappealing: they reproduce the shoddy artificiality but not the miraculous presence. The first time you use, say, Google Earth VR can feel a little transcendent. The earth spins at your whim, landmarks shrink beneath your feet, and you skip over mountains like a god. Recordings of it, on the other hand, look like a screensaver having a breakdown.

VR’s history is similarly contradictory. Most of the time, it pretends not to have one. It is always arriving—all future, no past. Each new headset rides in on a wave of hype and promise, pointing the way to a glorious headsetted world just over the horizon. Palmer Luckey, the cofounder of Oculus, whose successful Kickstarter campaign in 2012 helped start the most recent wave of VR, was, according to a Wired cover, “about to change gaming, movies, TV, music, design, medicine, sex, sports, art, travel, social networking, education—and reality.” After Facebook bought Oculus a few years later, Mark Zuckerberg declared that reality itself was too “limited”: “If you can’t think of any way that your reality can’t be better, then you’re not thinking hard enough.”

Yet, by this point, VR is actually rather old. Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Reality, an elegant, decades-spanning, four-hundred-page history of the medium, was published in 1991. Its dust jacket came blazoned with one of Arthur C. Clarke’s less impressive predictions: “Virtual Reality won’t merely replace TV. It will eat it alive.” Over thirty years later, sales of VR headsets have declined from 2022 to 2023, to about eight million sets sold worldwide. TV sales dipped too—to just under two hundred million.

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It remains true that the gap between using VR and actual experience is enormous. This is the hidden, fundamental fantasy of VR: that it could, someday, be an adequate fantasy; that the illusion it offers could be complete and irresistible; that the worlds it presents could seem real and necessary. What each actual system offers instead is its own particular spread of inadequacies, its own unique form of impoverished being. And the technology as a whole is never quite embraced because it never quite manages to exist.

Second Lives

In his brief, elegant book The Immersive Enclosure, the media theorist Paul Roquet argues that these failings might actually be a part of VR’s attraction, in the right circumstances. His subject is VR in Japan, where it has had a little more sustained popularity than in the United States. There, Roquet argues, VR is more often seen not as a portal to another world but as a kind of souped-up blindfold: “The most important attribute of the headset is its ability to offer a diminished reality, a tool that brackets out all but the task at hand.” Its most important predecessor is not film or video games or nineteenth-century panoramas, but the Walkman, the first piece of technology that let people replace part of the world around them with something else. (Roquet’s history is a surprising reminder of how strange and disruptive, even controversial, the ability to privately listen to music in public once was.) VR, then, would be just a Walkman for a few more senses. In that case, “the appeal of VR as an alternative frontier depends as much on what isn’t brought over from the existing world as what is.”

This appeal is stronger, of course, the more unpleasant the existing world becomes. Roquet focuses mainly on the social history around this virtual privacy. “Record numbers of Japanese relocated to urban environments” in the early 1960s, he notes, as the use of headphones was spreading, “often to live in wooden housing with notoriously thin walls and in close proximity to neighboring homes.” It is hard, however, not to see a vision of VR’s future here as well. It may well be that VR will get more alluring, and more satisfying, the worse things get—as the need for escape begins to outweigh the simulation’s inadequacies and as the real world becomes so degraded it begins to resemble VR. The whales disappear, and a VR dive cage is better than nothing; summers hit 120 degrees, wars spread, and Google Earth VR seems a better idea than going outside. In this sense, Palmer Luckey has been nurturing our virtual future from both sides: first as the founder of Oculus, and now as the head of a company producing military and law-enforcement drones. Perhaps VR will only truly arrive when the apocalypse does.

Certainly it became much more enticing during the pandemic. We Met in Virtual Reality emerges from this period, as does Hunting’s earlier web series Virtually Speaking and the YouTube channel People Make Games’s report on VRChat, “Making Sense of VRChat, the ‘Metaverse’ People Actually Like”—all of which document a vibrant social version of VR, a glitchy, garish, gregarious sanctuary. Users, generally in cartoonish custom avatars, congregate in customized, mildly interactive virtual spaces—from tree houses, living rooms, and bars to classrooms, malls, and theaters—most equipped with lots of mirrors so people can see their avatared selves. They might play a glitchy version of pool or drive around in more or less functional cars, but mostly they just hang out.

One might have expected VRChat to decline as lockdown lifted and Meta’s family-friendly, much better-funded social VR app was launched. But instead it has continued to grow. This year VRChat hit one hundred thousand simultaneous users for the first time. Not quite “the successor of the mobile internet” Zuckerberg predicted of his failed competitor, but impressive for VR’s current reality. And Covid is just one among many reasons people gave for their presence there, even during lockdown. They cited social anxiety, disability (several sections of We Met in Virtual Reality focus on a VR sign-language school), and grief; a desire for a place where they would be judged for what they said and did rather than how they looked; a desire for a place to be without speaking at all.

VRChat is chaotic, confusing, frequently hideous and ridiculous. But its antic, janky energy feels like a return to the old, pre-social media internet—the homegrown, ingrown spirit of message boards, multi-user dungeons, and Second Life. In it, you can see a somewhat less gloomy vision of what VR’s diminished reality might provide: not a revolution but a refuge, a chance to practice being human, or to take a break from its full weight; a place to resocialize, or to socialize more safely, with more distance and control. A place to try out being another version of yourself, or just to try to find a way to be yourself. And yet I can’t help but hope it will become less useful in the years to come, not more.


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