At the time of writing, Facebook Spaces – Facebook’s VR app – has just been made available in beta stage. Mark Zuckerberg’s live demo presented at the Oculus Connect summit last year was an impressive showcase of the app’s early-phase VR capabilities. In that demo, he and two Facebook employees convened and interacted –played, really – conjuring objects such as a chess set and playing cards, even fashioning their own pencil drawings into weapons for a sword fight.
They also ‘teleported’ to various 360-degree video environments together: from underwater to Mars – all fun and quite out of this world, but not as remarkable, perhaps, as when they went to Zuckerberg’s home. Zuckerberg had promised Priscilla, his wife, to check on Beast, their real-life dog. Beast was found on the sofa and appeared to be fine. Zuckerberg then answered a Messenger video call from Priscilla (who was not in VR), took a wefie with a selfie stick, and posted the photo to his real-life Facebook feed – all from within his VR space.
What Zuckerberg demonstrated is that VR is no longer that imaginative other world to which we escape individually; VR is now proposed as a habitable, connected, and viably useful, if alternative environment. Virtual and real might be thought as parallel worlds between which convergences and ‘passages’ are actually already happening.
The question is, will we be comfortable in VR, or, with it?
People who have experienced VR environments attest to their ‘realness’. They can ‘feel the space’ or ‘feel present’ in that space. Dr Frank Steinicke, a professor at the University of Hamburg’s Human-Computer Interaction team at the Department of Informatics, spent 24 hours in the Oculus VR to study its effects. Apart from dry eyes, he reported that he had experienced “strong moments of presence” such as feeling colder when his virtual sun went down. “We should be concerned about what VR is doing to us and what it could be doing to the brain,” Steinicke said in an interview, “and if we wear for long-term, will we lose the ability to communicate in the real world?”
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