I'm not using a gift link for this one, so you'll just have to picture old people with a big VR device strapped to their face. And imagine many paragraphs puffing the joys of VR — and the joys of travel.
But VR and travel are touted as a means to an end, and the end is the all-important social connection: “When V.R. is done well, you get mentally transported to a place,” said Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University.... A few minutes together on a virtual hike or sunset cruise can change a silent dinner to a lively conversation about past travel experiences...."
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Well its nice that VR gives them something to talk about. All the new technology or even recorded music, film, TV, lets us escape from the boredom of work or whatever.
Wasn't VR supposed the be next great thing, I vaguely remember Zuckerprick pushing it. Anyway glad its of some use.
It's not that complicated IMO.
A nice big flat panel TV (e.g., 75" to 100") can give one the sense of being there and seeing full-sized stuff without a clunky headset. Add in remote work Zoom or Teams meetings, and there goes social isolation.
VR headsets have not yet reached the transparent, forgettable stage. But, a large TV provides a true sense of space with true visual distance.
I'm hooked on You tube Itchy Boots, gal biking around the world...it's like riding along with her. No thanks for the headset.
Maybe Ralph Kramden was a V.R. futurist instead of an abusive husband when he said, from his dingy Bed-Stuy apartment:
"You want the world of tomorrow, Alice? You want the world of tomorrow? I'll give you the world of tomorrow. You're going to the Moon!"
While on the treadmill, I tend to watch European train videos -- train driver POV. Cities, countrysides, mountains, tunnels... Seems to be 100s of 'em.
Artificial inducements that garner anthropogenic hallucinations.
VR needs way more powerful batteries to really become useful.
People in "communities" need virtual reality to socialize with other people?
I was surprised that virtual reality wasn't listed by Gemini (NB, jumbo shrimp and military intelligence weren't included because I use them in the question to let Gemini know the type of oxymoron I was looking for):
Clearly Misunderstood
Act Naturally
Original Copy
Found Missing
Small Crowd
Pretty Ugly
Seriously Funny
Only Choice
Liquid Gas
Working Vacation
Bonus Classics:
Deafening Silence
Almost Exactly
Same Difference
Happily Married (Often called the "mother of all oxymorons" in popular lists)
Government Organization
Seinfeld used to be a significant engine of social connection - remember that?
Movies and series still can be. It's true that there are so many more such available (especially series) that if you just rely on chance, it's not as likely as it used to be that you'll come across others who are watching the same thing. But I know a number of older people, my parents and mother-in-law among them, who absolutely love British mysteries, for instance. (We will draw a curtain across my own enjoyment of these, for the moment.) Certainly they could get together and discuss the merits of the several programs, and even, if they coordinated themselves like a book club, the individual episodes.
Front porches. Or balconies if in an apartment situation, or comfortable chairs in the hallway where residents can sit "outside" and greet their neighbors. Church services. Bingo - or back to bridge, where you can chat more.
My husband and I are looking forward to actual travel together in this next nomadic chapter of ours, because we've been more or less constantly together in familiar places since his retirement and get tired of talking about the same things. But as one of the retirement travel YouTubers he watches says, there are the go-go years, the slow-go years, and the no-go years, even for people who like to travel, so eventually we expect to be pretty permanently stationary again - and then maybe it'll be up to us to recruit our elderly acquaintances for the trash-talking, competitive dominoes we played with our neighbors while our kids were little and none of us had the money to go out for our social gatherings.
I call VR bullshit. Every story hyping this technology has overstated the popularity of VR. Meta lost hundreds of billions chasing a tiny market. Zuckerberg was a fool for betting so much on "everyone being in VR all the time."
But here we go again, now with the "hey seniors" bait. My mom won't even use her smart phone to do anything but call and text. That's a typical senior. I'd be shocked if they get a dozen at any one time in their "virtual" world.
Mark Levin wrote a lot about what he identified (not his term, I believe) as "pseudo-events" taking the place of news. Yes the "papers" have always had feature stories and other non-hard news articles, but the rise of cable and streaming news has created more opportunity for pseudo events, like this story. More often they are "polls" or trend-spotting or other hard-to-verify facts. Or staright press releases: "Look at this turducken cake one baker made!"
This VR bullshit. Is it news? Is it PR for Meta? Who knows?
What almost every single reader can say is, "This doesn't affect me in the least." And that is the hallmark of most pseudo events. Their meaninglessness. Which raises the question, what is all this fluff and crap taking the place of?
Facts. Facts and other news inconvenient to Democrats. The corporate media will do whatever they can to avoid actual reporting.
I’m a fan/early adopter of VR/AR. I have several Oculus Go and Oculus 2, which I got after buying a Samsung Odyssey nearly a decade ago. I got an Xreal OnePro last year.
As much as I enjoy them, everything I’ve read from Meta is hype. The best product I’ve seen from Meta for VR are some very good virtual videos of places like Notre Dame Cathedral and Summit of Mt. Everest. The latter is quite awesome, considering most will never be able to actually stand at the summit, and the VR gives you the same virtual (look in any direction) since of being there. Neat and quite an experience, but not really worth the cost of the headset.
I primarily use my sets as personal/private entertainment systems. Imagine watching a near IMAX production system sitting on your sofa for under $1,000. That’s expensive, but not so when compared to a good 90 inch 4k television. And that’s its best feature.
AR is much more powerful for industrial uses, but that’s a lot harder to explain to consumers.
Yeah, my sentiment is that VR is mostly hype at this stage. I think it will always be thus, up until the moment that the hardware is some kind of direct implant to the brain. Anything else is just a fancy viewer, really.
When Covid hit, we got Facebook portals. The good ones are that long screen that rotates to either Portrait or Landscape orientation. But they're terrific. My mom was shut in at an Assisted Living facility, and we couldn't visit, so the portal made a huge difference. And now we still use it for the kids and grandkids.
VR hasn't expanded beyond small niches because it's unnatural. First, few to no people prefer to wear a headset. Second, the resolution of small devices is often too grainy up close (but getting way better). Third, the human eye is built to look at objects at real distances, not stuff slammed up against the face. In sum, VR is fatiguing in ways that natural vision at distance is not.
Nintendo's Virtual Boy of 1995 was one of their biggest flops. Meta's multi-billion-dollar failure followed from the clumsy headsets with fatigue and...frankly the draw of the VR pr0n niche requires legs...
Mary Sue: "Which bikini should I bring?"
Pat: "None. You old hussy, you've got no business in a bikini."
Morgan: "Yeah Mary Sue, take off the bikini."
Pat: "Morgan, you old goat, hush your mouth."
Like Leland, I was an early adopter. I had an HTC Vive, and now use a Meta Quest 3. The Metaverse may not be the answer, but VR has potential for the mobility impaired.
Simulated walking is a problem for VR games, so they have a method, like moving your arms or clicking to a spot, to move around. That is convenient for people who have trouble with real walking.
At a senior living facility, the exercise class offered might be 'chair aerobics'. That's dismal. Let's have Beat Saber with songs from their era.
'Doom' came out thirty years ago. The old folks in the article are in their 70's. Video games are not unfamiliar to all Boomers.
I'm sure the VR excursion to Santorini described in the article was shit. Probably just a Youtube 360 video, but there is potential. If the participants have avatars and can explore and interact, it becomes a collective experience.
It feels like the fad for VR in education has run it's course. To learn, students have to think and be challenged. VR could have a role, but it tended to be all sizzle and no steak. Old folks like sizzle. Goofing around in a virtual world to escape their physical limitations, is all good.
What y’all got dis robot dog in here fo’?!
If you don’t mind Enigma, I want to add on more issue with VR systems to your excellent list.
The small projection screens inside the VR are like small space heaters sitting about an inch from the bare eye. Initially, the moisture of the eyes will often cause the screens to fog over. Soon, the little heaters will dry the eyes out, which solves the fogging problem, but leads to discomfort with prolonged use. As a true VR headset system (as opposed to AR), is designed to block out external disruptions, nobody has really solved this problem. An AR system, meant to augment the external world, can let in the external senses, and therefore can have natural ventilation. The problem isn’t completely resolved, but it is much better than VR.
When VR or FPV (first-person view) is combined with drones, there are numerous commercial and military applications. FPV drones are also the modern version of radio controlled airplanes.
See the 13 minute video below of a guy flying an FPV drone up and down the Matterhorn for a commercial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fLD78dLZ1Q
Mike (MJB Wolf) said...
This VR bullshit. Is it news? Is it PR for Meta? Who knows?
The wolf man may be on to something. VR for the elderly may be an evergreen topic for a journalist to fill a space. Google brought me to this article covering the same ground from 7 years ago.
https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/how-virtual-reality-helping-seniors-breathe-new-life-old-memories-ncna1069461
Maybe it's a mundane article because the VR for the elderly is so obvious.
If the participants have avatars and can explore and interact, it becomes a collective experience.
I want to emphasize this, because this is something I’ve learned about traveling anywhere, with or without VR. Part of the joy of “being there” is sharing there with others. VR can partially help someone understand some of what it is like to “being there”, but without the shared experience, it is only partially better than looking at a photograph.
The value of shared experience is so important to me now, when I travel to somewhere new. I get little joy from trying to explain a place like Santorini to someone that has never actually been there. The more amazing and special the place, the more descriptive words and pictures simply are inadequate to explain what makes it amazing and special.
This gives me great idea for a new type of nursing homes. Let’s call it “Happy Endings Nursing Home”.
We can hook all the guy patients, and women too, to VR headsets and stream porn all day. That’s got to be better than laying in bed all day listening to old people talk about their VR trip to Santorini.
I can’t get past Golden Oreos. What a travesty. I’m not looking forward to my Golden Oreos and cranberry juice stage of life.
Well VR is one thing. But like many other readers, I've been able to go to distant lands and different times by picking up a well written novel. Easy, requires no batteries, and very little effort. OTOH I've actually been to Santorini--seen the scene of the crime where my eldest daughter met her future husband. It is a pretty place--I'll give it that.
Ah look at that.
Better than reality VR is here.
This takes care of a lot of the assisted suicide discussion right?
Aggie said...
Yeah, my sentiment is that VR is mostly hype at this stage. I think it will always be thus, up until the moment that the hardware is some kind of direct implant to the brain. Anything else is just a fancy viewer, really.
It will be hype for a month, 2 at most.
But 2 months ago I was writing code at my job. Everyone thought AGI was hype.
Get ready for a lot of things to not be hype anymore.
When I first read this headline, I thought it might be referring to Jeff Bridges, and now all I can think about is Jeff Bridges eating Golden Oreos.
“When V.R. is done well, you get mentally transported to a place,”
Also, when a novel is well done or a movie or a computer game or a campfire story or a Meade music video.
Or Todd Bridges. CC, JSM
Achilles: “ Better than reality VR is here. This takes care of a lot of the assisted suicide discussion right?”
Mmm…in Soylent Green, you got a little VR experience when you volunteered to die. Peter Ustinov watched footage of the steppe or something. CC, JSM
I think a lot of future jobs will be people using VR avatars to control humanoid robotic drones in highly dangerous environments like inside nuclear power plants and in in factories and refineries. Just think of what we can accomplish without having to worry about OSHA regulations for health and safety
Howard:
Surrogates (2009) with Bruce Willis...
Thanks, Enigma. That looks like the kind of action flick my teenage grandsons would like
I think I'd rather do this than actually travel around the world. When I was younger and working for someone else. I thought that if I could save up enough money, I would retire and travel the world. Now I have all the time and money I would need to travel continuously and I have no desire. Travel is hard work, stressful, and full of timelines. You lose control of who and how many are around you. The big thing is that without being home, I have too little to do: no chores, no projects, no tools and materials to work with. I need work to do. Even when I just visit friends this bugs me. Too much idle time when I'm away from home.
bago, if you go the airbnb/self-cater route, you have to shop, cook and clean just like at home. That would fill some of the void of chores/puttering. And it sets you up to treat the travel as just living in a different place, doing real life stuff, instead of touristing. CC, JSM
It occurred to me that big screens could be combined with sensory-deprivation chambers, but soon enough we should be able to pipeline VR directly into our brains. As in "Surrogates" some day we may have robotic doubles who experience the world and transmit the sights and sounds back to our brains. I'd worry about the practical problems and health effects of remaining motionless for long periods while your double is doing the living for you.
Mark Levin wrote a lot about what he identified (not his term, I believe) as "pseudo-events" taking the place of news.
Daniel Boorstin had the idea of "pseudo-events" back in the 1960s. It found an echo in French thinkers like Debord ("the spectacle") and Baudrillard (hyperreality). Boorstin, though, was more concerned with events planned and stories planted by politicians and corporations, not so much with the fluff stories that fill the internet.
Travel is hard work, stressful, and full of timelines.
We cruise a lot, because it is less work, but there are timelines. We’ve met people that do back to back cruises which cuts the work even more and whatever you missed on the previous timeline you catch next time.
A crappy movie, but the opening scene of The Lawnmower Man suggests how senior citizens will really be using VR.
Travel to your backyard if you can't travel to Santorini. There are universes enough for anyone with the right attitude. Just get away from the screentime and actually do something, anything.
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