For the past many months, virtual reality (VR) has been taking centre stage at tech shows, featuring in keynotes by the biggest names in technology and making its slow way mainstream as VR headsets become available to the general public at a not-too-unaffordable price. If nothing else, there's Google Cardboard.
After first ignoring it, I've spent the better part of the past month inside my VR Gear awestruck with the way in which this technology can make things seem more real than real. And that's despite most of one's senses and faculties not being called into play. Even if you're looking at a mere photograph, in VR you're in the photograph, not detached from it and looking at it as a separate thing as happens in real life.
It's after watching myself watch VR and observing others and their reactions that I found myself wondering what it would do to our brains in the longer run. More immediately, it can amaze, scare and disorient you. I watched as one person nearly fell of his chair when a dinosaur came right up, as it were, to sniff him out as a food source. I found myself tickled to see people pointing at chairs and tables and saying "Oh wow, there's the Eiffel Tower," or "Would you look at the way this guy is dancing!" I scared myself silly once when I was gazing at somewhat unsavoury sea creatures swimming around me and I felt something brush strongly against my head. I screamed and shot out of my headset only to realise the welcro strap had moved a little, making me feel a jellyfish had touched me. Any wonder they advise you not to hand a VR headset to a child under 13 years of age. It's sometimes frightening sometimes too close and too richly large. In VR, you can go up to the very very edge of the Victoria Falls and look straight down into the abyss, something you wouldn't do in real life but you can see in VR because a drone has shot the footage.
Mind you, after a few rounds, you quickly become jaded and don't take offence if a shark is inches away from your face, or you just dropped off a cliff. It's other things that make me wonder more... When you get out of a VR headset, there are moments of complete disorientation. You can't help ask yourself where on earth you've landed, all of a sudden. Old familiar surroundings and objects have a strange unfamiliar look as you try to make sense of them. But more than that, as VR becomes really common, what are our brains going to make of two sets of realities? There are everyday goings on that happen seemingly automatically but are actually processed and learned by our brains.
For instance, when I reach out, I can pick up the glass on the table. My brain knows this for as long as I've been around. But when in VR, I reach out to a glass on a table and can't pick it up, my arm reaches into empty air. Something or someone comes up to me in real life and there's no doubt when it violates a personal boundary. In VR, something comes up and seems to attack me, but I'm unharmed. So what happens to my fear response and my natural 'fight or flight' instinct? What happens to the important ability to separate danger from non-danger?
And what happens when they throw sensation into the mix? Samsung has come up with a VR chair which does that, involving more senses and tricking the brains me more.
There's also already ways of interacting with and impact a virtual world, evident in games and in mixed reality scenarios. We've already seen the chaos that Pokemon Go can cause as a bit of Augmented Reality becomes superimposed on the real world.
The human brain has always been thought of being capable of doing much more than it does and being able to handle more than we give it credit for on a day to day basis. But can it go so far as to handle two realities?
Look out for the T-Rex.
(The article first appeared in BusinessLine's Technophile)