 "Virtual reality: Disruptive or destructive?")
If you dislike putting on those sticky, ill-fitting 3D glasses given out at movie theatres for watching 3D films, chances are you won’t be wildly excited about donning Virtual Reality (VR) goggles to take in a virtual reality experience. Besides, at first glance, VR headsets look more like wearables for obsessive gamers than for people who can’t live without their PlayStations.
Yet virtual reality (VR) is fast becoming today’s “it” technology. It is finding new and exciting applications — not just in entertainment, but a host of other industries such as tourism, real estate, health, education, media, fashion, design and so on. And it’s expected to grow bigger. According to a report by investment bank Goldman Sachs, the market for VR will be $60 billion by 2025, up from less than a $1 billion today.
India has begun to dip its toes into the technology, too. On October 24 the country’s first online virtual reality magazine, ElseVR (pronounced “Elsewhere”), was launched in Delhi with a set of three documentaries shot in the VR format. At the Mumbai Academy of Moving Images (MAMI) festival last month, the promo for the sequel to S S Rajamouli’s monster hit, Bahubali, featured a VR spot enabling the audience to take a virtual tour of the film’s sets. Furniture e-tailer Urban Ladder is also experimenting with VR for their kitchen and decor solutions.
VR’s appeal lies in the 360 degrees, immersive experience it provides. Seen through a headset like the Google Cardboard or the Samsung Gear VR or the more sophisticated (and pricier) ones like the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive, it gives you the sense of being physically present in the virtual environment it summons before your eyes.
You could sit in your living room and experience the mind-numbing shock of a mortar attack in Aleppo as if you were right there on the street. Or, you could take a walk through the VR model of your house before it is built, wander around the vaulted chambers of the Louvre, or experience the scary thrill of swimming with hammerhead sharks before deciding whether to book that diving holiday in the Bahamas.
It’s why VR is called the ultimate empathy machine. It’s also why industries are scrambling to adopt the tech to tempt consumers with a more “realistic” feel of their products. It is the next big disruptor, so goes the chorus, the next big transformative technology that is about to change our world.
So what’s not to like in VR? Well, for starters, its compelling immediacy is really a double-edged sword. Because it gives you the sensation of being physically present on the scene, the urge to accept it as the truth is far greater than what you may see in 2D or 3D images on a flat screen. Hence, as the technology becomes cheaper and more widely used, ethical issues — the imperative of clarifying which part is “truth” and which part “created” — will loom large.
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Besides, the psychological impact of VR is still being studied. While browsing through a virtual reality fashion store may be perfectly anodyne, research suggests that emotions of fear and pain are so dangerously amplified in VR that they could leave a permanent psychological scar. Scenes of torture or a horror movie watched in VR could leave you screaming to tear your headset off.
Even its so-called revolutionary applications tend to feel chillingly dystopic at times. In China, which is now the biggest market for VR, tech companies are trying to develop adaptive VR teaching tools. These include software that changes lessons if a child’s attention begins to waver or pick out their “foibles” and design curricula accordingly.
Will the classroom of the future have children strapped to their VR goggles, their every impulse mapped and predicted by their digital avatar teachers? Even if you aren’t a 2D luddite, that vision will likely fill you with dread.
Twitter: @ShumaRaha