Books made you co-create new worlds. Film and TV showed you other places. Virtual Reality takes you there.
VIRTUAL & AUGMENTED REALITIES
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28 SEPTEMBER
08:30 – 11:30AM
A quick history of the imagination
Not very long ago, people relied on the spoken or written word or painted images or music to help them imagine a different place, a different reality, a story they could relate to as humans.
Then came photography – a medium that caught actual time as it was at a particular moment and made it accessible to you later. It was the first time-machine – a way to re-live and to re-imagine what something had been like. A very faithful and persuasive document, albeit a static one.
Then came moving pictures and the imagination could be set to work creating and devouring fantastic imagery of real and unreal places that was brought to you in a cinema or at home through the TV.
The history of the imagination as described above is a movement from high levels of user-participation and co-creation to lower ones. The lower forms have become more spectacular (film, TV and to some extent video games), but the loss of direct brain co-creation has also pacified us, made us more consumers.
Virtual Reality wipes the board
Going by the latest inventions in virtual reality, we seem to be faced with a redesigning of the ways in which our imaginations can work, how they will be challenged and charmed.
The key distinction with VR technology is that we can now be offered another entry-point to existence itself – another place in which all the previous media can be delivered to us either singly or combined.
It’s like finding a warp-hole in space-time, a black hole, on the other side of which we don’t really know what we’ll find.
Virtual Reality has the power to change the game so fundamentally that we are only scraping the surface of the ways in which it will do so.
For a very interesting take on where it all might lead, watch Chris Milk at TED, opening the doors of VR storytelling.
How will it feel? How will it change us?
Imagine that you spend all your working hours wearing a VR headset. Your job is to control a robot at a remote site. The robot’s tasks are either too tough to do in person, or too dangerous. But you are experiencing the input of your hard work nonetheless, you’re seeing and hearing everything even if you’re not there. Maybe you are a solider in a theatre of war or a surgeon working in the ruins of an earthquake.
You are there, but you are not there. At the end of the day you take off your headset and go home to your family. Who has been to work, you or your imagination? Even if you are physically safe, you might still be mentally scarred by what you’ve seen.
This is the power of VR. The emersion is so complete that the boundary between imagination and real life will be gone. It’s both a complete co-creative medium and one that takes you over. If this sounds like the stuff of sci-fi novels, well it is –that reality is now here and something we need to be highly aware of if we are to safeguard our humanity.
The game has already changed.
Want to find out more about Virtual & Augmented Realities? Make sure you sign up to the DSMLF meeting on 28th September and join your peers for a lively debate on the matter.