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…
