Virtual Reality And Human Curiosity

As my followers may have noticed, I have not posted in a week or two. I am very busy working on my thesis and job hunting for when I finish my Master's program. Therefore you will not see me around much. Take this post a my last one in a while. Once I submit my thesis and find a job, then I'll come back to my routine of almost-daily posts.

For now, I leave you with a thought-provoking piece on virtual reality (VR) written by a good friend of mine. He does not have a Steem account so at least for now, let's call him AsWhoper420. I think that would be his chosen name. He is a computer scientist and maybe one of the best programmers I know. I am sure you will enjoy his piece.

Best,

@capatazche

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Are all the things I perceive with my senses real? Is the human experience, as we know it, a virtual simulation? What does it mean for something to be "real” or not? These are the types of questions I found asking myself while witnessing nature and its beauty from the window of a train in movement. The different layers and tones of green in the vegetation, the subtle and smooth dancing of leaves to the rhythm of the wind, the beautiful color gradient in the sky as the sun descends in the horizon, the flock of birds flying over this gradient, the mechanical sound of the engine, and so on. Scenery so vivid and immersive that it would be a heartbreaking to discern it as not “real”. But in the end, these are all stimuli or bits of information captured by our different sensory systems and sent to the brain for processing in order to have an understanding of the world so we can act accordingly. To put it in more simpler terms, we can think of our notion of reality as the output of a function that takes in external stimuli, with the brain being the function itself. So, what happens when human technology advances to such a point where we are able to generate artificial or virtual stimuli that for the brain is indistinguishable from those coming from the natural or “real” world? What happens when the line between real and virtual completely dissipates?

Most of us have heard the term “Virtual Reality” in one context or another, specially in the past decade, with a wide range of devices that generate virtual experiences leaving the dark room of research labs and entering the market, readily accessible to common folk that have a not so humble budget at their disposal. Most of these devices come in the form of head mounted displays, like the HTC Vive, which target the visual sensory system by generating virtual scenes that try to resemble the physical world. But as some of you probably know, these relatively commercial devices, and even the cutting edge ones sitting on research labs, are still impossible to generate truly immersive virtual experiences. The main reason for this is that the current state of technology forces us to come up with wearable hardware implementations. That is, in order to undergo virtual experiences we must wear some sort of device.

Pixabay image source.

Such wearable hardware implementations do not feel natural and some of them even impose restrictions on our natural body motions. I am of the opinion that, even with exponential leaps in technological advancement, this approach will never be able to generate truly immersive virtual experiences that can rival those of the natural world. My reasoning for this is that during the virtual experience, no matter how immersive it might feel to us, at some degree or another we are consciously aware that we are wearing a piece of hardware in the physical world.

I think that the future of truly immersive virtual experiences resides on Computer-to-Brain interfaces, that is, artificial devices that can be implanted in the brain in order to achieve bidirectional communication paths between the brain and the device. Such device can emulate the electrical activity generated by our different sensory systems when processing stimuli from the actual physical world. With this technology the possibilities are limitless, the Matrix will no longer be a fictional concept, but a very realistic one. This will become the Pandora’s box of the modern era. Will we, as a society, blindly open up this box, driven by our insatiable curiosity, without fully understanding the the consequences this might bring? Will we be ready? The clock is ticking.

Best,

AsWhoper420