Virtual reality (VR) may be best known for its impact on video games, where it has dramatically changed the user experience, but its future is not limited to gaming. Silicon Valley sees the creation of virtual worlds as the ultimate free-market solution to a political problem. In a world of increasing wealth inequality, environmental destruction, and political instability, the vision is for a device that will transport people to a virtual world without pain or suffering.
Billionaires from the technology say that some people may misunderstand virtual reality, which is precisely why they may criticize it. They also emphasize that VR promises to create the world that everyone wants. It is not possible, on Earth, to give everyone what they want. However, virtual reality can significantly help in this.
VR is an attractive escape, but it is not the solution to the world’s ills. Real-world problems will remain beyond the confines of the metaverse created by companies like Epic, Valve , and Facebook. Without decisive and radical action, the planet will continue to be destroyed, the gap between rich and poor will widen, and totalitarian political movements will grow. At the same time, many will be connected to a virtual world. But the worst thing is that the virtual world will be owned and controlled by the companies that create it.
Many argue that VR is a very expensive technology. For example, Valve's premiere headset – the Valve Index – costs $1,000. The cheapest is Facebook's Oculus Quest 2 at $299.
Furthermore, many report that VR requires an incredible amount of money and free space to set up properly, and it doesn't stop there.
Many people experience nausea and vertigo in virtual reality. Sometimes, they can overcome this by adjusting the hardware properly or slowly exposing themselves to the technology. Furthermore, the technology is incredibly inaccessible to people with different abilities. The industry made huge strides in making video games accessible to a wide range of people in 2020, but virtual reality — with its bulky headsets and strange controllers — makes it impossible for some people to use them.
But all of these problems can be overcome. As John Carmack mentioned in his interview with Rogan, tech companies will bring down the cost of headsets. So we can have devices that are cheap enough that most, if not all, people can afford them.
Carmack was clear about the importance of tech companies in pushing virtual reality. “Not everyone can afford luxury. However, some luxury places can be simulated, to some extent, with virtual reality. The simulation is not as good as the real thing. If you’re rich and have your own mansion or private island, good for you … you’re probably not the people who will benefit the most. Most people in the world live in cramped apartments which is not what they would choose if they had unlimited money,” he said.
That's true. Most people in the world live in cramped quarters and would choose not to. But Carmack's solution is to create a virtual world where people can escape. It's a promise of a future where living conditions are still cramped, but people have accepted their material circumstances and have been transported to a fantasy world created by tech companies.
And VR won't stop at screens and speakers. Elon Musk is working on a brain-machine interface called Neuralink. Similarly, Valve's Gabe Newell is heavily invested in creating the literal Matrix. "We're a lot closer to The Matrix than people realize," Newell told IGN in 2020.
In a television interview with News 1 , Newell was clear about creating a world where brains and computers are interconnected and computers can make changes to the brain.
For Newell, the goal is to create a fantasy world that is better and more immersive than the real world. “So the visual experience, the visual fidelity that we can create – the real world will stop being the metric that we apply to the best possible visual fidelity. The real world will look flat, colorless, blurry compared to the experiences that can be created in people’s brains.”
For Carmack, virtual reality is a way to make the world a better place. "It's how we make the world better, by creating technologies and distributing them to people so that they have something better than they would have had if it didn't exist,"he said.
The rush to create digital worlds ignores both the harsh realities of the physical and the ways we could all handle if tech companies controlled not only the apps we use every day, but also the very world we live in.
