This article was initially published on August 8th, 2015 by Mark Ristich
The Question
When I tell people that I am interested in Virtual Reality and creating virtual spaces, inevitably the question will come up.
"Why would you want to live in virtual reality when you can live in real reality?"
It's a valid question. We should start by clarifying the context of this conversation. There is a real fear that modern technologies are captivating people so deeply that they are willing to give up time experiencing, exploring, and socializing in the outside world in exchange for time spent in front of a screen. This isn't a question of what makes virtual reality great. It's a question of what our world becomes when we pursue virtual experiences in place of real experiences, and how far we can go down this path until we've gone too far and lost sight of what Heidegger called In-der-welt-sein, our sense of knowing the world around us is authentic.
This is a question about the extreme future, the point at which our minds cannot distinguish the virtual from the real. A world surrounded by holographs could be as persuasive as a world surrounded by real people. In this future world, how do we know the person across from us is real? And if they aren't, shouldn't I care? My answer: well, maybe. But not yet.
A Pantomime for the Ages
Currently, so many of our experiences are reduced in quality when we mimic them with technology. Yet we've been living in virtual realities for decades already and adapting our culture and language to fit these realities. People point out problems with this all the time - children around a dinner table with their phones in front of them instead of participating in collective family discussion, or when someone has their speakers blaring at full volume, unable to hear the cars behind them honking.
It may sound like a strawman, but virtual experiences are any mimicries of real events, often geared to induce some sensation. The music you listen to is mastered to reflect the virtual orientation of instruments in the room. In fact, research in audio technology argue that the prime intention is to symbolize authentic aural experiences. You will hear drums off to the right, piano to your left, and the lead singer right in front of you. Audio engineers spend weeks manipulating the tones and shapes of each sound to make it seem as authentic as possible. When done effectively, your mind transports you into that place.
There is the same level of mimicry done in the hardware of any microphone. By capturing raw vibrations and coding them into electrical signals, you are able to get a sense of a person's voice, as persuasive and believable as if they were standing next to you. They can speak softly and loudly, move towards and away from you. When they laugh, you can hear the reverberations come from their belly so that you know it was real. But it wasn't. It was a clever pattern recognition system that recorded some data, processed it, and transmitted it to you.
But music and voice, those are created by people! What about the virtual worlds with impossibly sculpted women, or hyper-defined hulking men? That's inauthentic.
I agree, and it's a very real concern. Thankfully, chasing authenticity is in our culture nature, according to recent research. If virtual reality is to be anything, it must become authentic.
Authenticity and Ambiguity in Virtual Spaces
We do our best to evolve language around new media, using slang and emojis to paint our written statements with our emotional state. In the current world of networked communication, content is generated and judged in a hyperspeed loop from concept to content to consumption over a matter of hours. We generate .GIFs and printed posters with images that capture the emotional states that we are feeling adequately. We want to be our pure social selves, even within the context of web anonymity. We want to share our authentic emotions, and will either seek out adaptations to support the weaknesses of the media, or generate the subculture ourselves.
Exhibit A
We willingly don a suit of exaggeration when communicating in these media as a reaction to the lifelessness of most written communication. I'm as much a criminal as any, using CAPS when I'm dead serious or endless strings of characters when I'm excited. These actions augment what is, by its nature, a less authentic medium than direct face-to-face communication.
Still the predominant medium suffers, and solutions are being proposed regularly of how to capture these more implied emotional states, the ones less reliant on phrasing, instead indicated by tone and body language. The medium evolves. The language adapts. The adaptations are judged. This process is itself the search for authenticity among ambiguity. <a href=https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=BSqcBQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA227>These judgements result in social authenticity, and I have no reason to assume that as we move to more immersive forms of digital media that this process will cease.
Exhibit B
A Human Reality
For all the claims that VR lacks authenticity or drives ambiguity between what is real and what is generated, I claim that it is unrealistic to expect that the virtual world would be predominantly populated with virtual people. Even in these nascent stages, companies like Altspace, VRChat, and uForis are taking advantage of the unique experience of sharing virtual spaces in realtime with real people. With rapidly improving gesture control and body tracking, we should be expecting the VR Revolution, at its core, to be interpersonal.
Mimicking human communication is a phenomenally difficult problem - one that is unlikely to be solved by computation any time soon.
Teaching an artificial intelligence to speak convincingly won't realize itself before costs of displays are driven down and commercializable VR headsets. VR will have to take control before automated systems have dynamic speech production. Before you think that Siri or Cortana are convincing, consider that you are always aware that you are speaking to a machine when doing so, and ask 'answerable' questions. No one (I hope) has made a habit about sharing their feelings with their smartphone or asking rhetorical questions (the poor machines, how you abuse them). Our virtual reality will first be us, and we'll have to get used to that. When the time comes to ask if we've created mimicry that is too real to distinguish from our own reality, then new problems will arise, and we may have to change our course.