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Virtual Reality Stumbles Into Culture
Even for the majority of the population that isn’t that much into most technologies, it’s hard not to miss all the video clips of people walking around, driving and stumbling with Apple’s new Virtual Reality (VR) headset on. And how rapidly people started stating rules of etiquette. VR is not new, but it’s having an important cultural moment.
Why this matters, what it might mean for the future of VR and how might culture more broadly adopt Virtual Reality. This is a pivotal moment for VR.
VR has been around a while. If one wants to consider that VR is really about manufactured illusions, we might then see it as going back to the Egyptians and Romans who created illusions to entertain the public and for ritual purposes, using architecture, art, music and light. In the Middle Ages, convex mirrors and light were used, for both entertainment purposes as well, most commonly known as the stereoscope.
The technology has improved a wee bit since then. Creating alternate realities has long been a human practice, even going back to our cave dwelling times when we created moving images by painting image shifts on cave walls and the flickering light of fire making it look like, well, a movie.
The first time we took this distanced form of VR and decided to stick it on our heads was back in 1968 and the device was called the “Sword of Damocles” (maybe naming technology products was more fun back then?) It was so heavy, it had to be suspended from the cieling!
There’s an interesting history of VR here if you like. In this article, I’m looking at how VR is entering our sociocultural systems today and how culture is reacting. How humans react as a society, the norms and rules we set, are key indicators of the potential scale of adoption.
Consumer VR headsets have been around just over a decade. The hype has never reached the scale of today’s Generative Aartificial Intelligence (GAI) tools like ChatGPT or Claude. Last year, Apple released it’s Vision Pro product, which they term as spatial computing. The primary difference being that it’s not just for entertainment, but can be used…
