The problem with VR isn’t the tech — it’s people

Like any healthy and normal human being, I often obsess over the public perception of virtual reality.

There is seemingly no end to the antagonism that VR seems to inspire. Most of these arguments are shallow and misleading, but what interests me is not the arguments themselves, but the reasoning that leads to them.

I’ve never tried it — and I hate it

Gamers are a particularly interesting kind of animal. They’re known for a particular flavor of obstinance: the choice-supportive bias.

In general, human beings will defend choices they’ve made. The more important the choice, the more they defend it. For most of us, this might come in the form of self-justifying a type of car or romantic partner. For younger people — who put undue emphasis on video games— this comes in the form of game platform defense.

I’ve noticed that most of the most vehement arguments against VR come from those with the least experience. They tell themselves they don’t need it, and if they don’t need it, than nobody needs it. These thought processes are often driven not by experience, but by the very human need to feel adequate. If you spend $X on a gaming console, and you’re entirely satisfied with it, than what more could VR possibly offer for it’s ridiculous price tag?

Imagination. Who needs it?

Choice-supportive bias is not the only fun human flaw that VR’s very existence has to contend with. The larger problem is that if you’ve never tried VR, you can not truly imagine what being in VR is like.

This is a core tenet of the human psyche. If we have no context, no prior experience, nothing to go on, we simply cannot conjure the images and feelings required to truly understand an unknown concept.

For most people, asking them to imagine a VR experience might as well be asking them to grapple with infinity. I won’t say it can’t be done (maybe a substance-aided mind could tackle it) but it’s very difficult. Instead, we fall back on what we know. And what we know, sucks.

3D movies killed the virtual star

The concept of 3D in media has had a weird and storied history. None of which I’ll go into here. Suffice to say, the general public has been burned more than once on things they’ve decided are gimmicks. 3D movies are the prime example, but I’ll also lump in Google Cardboard, lenticicular “holographic” screens, and perspective based 3D tricks. Hell, I’ll even throw in those mildly painful magic eye puzzles (It’s a schooner!)

All of this has primed each and every human — almost from birth — to be inherently skeptical about anything 3D in their media. This is a very odd point of view, one that an alien observer would find fascinating, but it’s also a huge obstacle facing VR.

The word “gimmick” is thrown around a lot. Nobody wants to be scammed, nobody wants to fall for a marketing trap. Everyone wants to be smarter than the corporations that are advertising to them, to not fall for their whiles and whimsies.

The problem is, on those rare occasions where a corporation is advertising something that is actually revolutionary, they’re fighting an almost unwinnable battle.

Teleporting?! How PEDESTRIAN!

Movement in VR is tricky. One of the major complaints you’ll often see is the use of teleportation as a movement mechanic. “Teleporting is unrealistic and unimmersive,” they’ll argue,” since I can’t move like I can in other games, than VR itself must be flawed.”

This is a clash of two titans. A battle of the ages, being waged angrily on forums and Discords. Gamers have been playing FPS games all their life, and anything different than what they know will fall under scrutiny.

Developers respond in the only way they can, by adding smooth locomotion options into their games. People who try VR for the first time (after reading all the Reddit comments about how much they hate teleportation) will try smooth locomotion, promptly vomit all over themselves, and then proclaim that VR makes people sick and has a “long way to go.”

Yet, the most fascinating thing happens when the argument is held to a flame. Whether it’s running at 100 miles an hour in Doom or jumping every obstacle without so much as breaking a sweat in Mirror’s Edge, FPS games are about as unrealistic as we can possibly get.

Pressing “R” to reload is just as much of an abstraction as smooth locomotion. But the people making these claims grew up in a post-Doom world. They’ve spent most of their lives pressing “W” to move forward, and VR doesn’t conform to those rules.

Wires? No thanks, I thought this was the future.

Then there are always those that are waiting for wireless VR, as if a cable is somehow the difference between total immersion and an expensive paperweight.

I think this is a subset of a larger argument, the “VR 2.0” argument. Many people are waiting for the so-called “next generation” of VR.

Any VR enthusiast will tell you this point makes no sense, but I don’t blame the people that argue it. Headset companies have done themselves no favors with conflicting and confusing marketing.

Is it a console? Is it a peripheral? It’s both!

We’ve already established that humans can only rely on their prior experiences to frame new ones. When something comes along that doesn’t have a frame, it’s an imagination free for all. Mental real estate goes for premium prices, but the zoning laws are ridiculous.

What is VR? Is it a console, is it a platform, is it a peripheral?

If it’s a console, than the VR 2.0 people have ground to stand on. Consoles have generations, so the argument checks out. Except it’s not a console.

If it’s a platform, than waiting for a second generation of VR is like waiting for a second generation of a “PC.” The argument is too loose to stand.

If it’s a peripheral, than what’s all the fuss? When’s the last time you bought a monitor, or a keyboard? Why not just wait 10 years when they’re better?

The problem with VR is that it’s all of these things, but none of them describe what it truly is. In a very real sense, VR is an experience. It’s trip to Disney World or a skydive. You can tell someone the exact mechanics of skydiving, but that’ll never even come close to the experience.

Oculus does an admirable job. Their ads don’t emphasize the technology, they emphasize what can be done with it — the emotions it evokes, the adventures it enables. The problem is, how do you turn that promise into a purchase?

Money?? I don’t have that!

How much should a VR headset cost?

That question, I suspect, is one that keeps many development teams up at night. The question can be rephrased an infinite number of ways, each with a different answer.

How much would you pay to become an action hero? How much would you pay to see the bottom of the ocean? How much would you pay to explore your childhood home?

Oculus subsidizes their hardware costs by requiring their users to use Facebook. Valve places a high price tag on their hardware to weed out the riffraff. HTC throws darts at the wall and sees where they land. Time will tell which is the correct approach. My money is on none of them.

VR as a concept is so open ended, it’s potential so high, that putting a price on it is nearly impossible. When that potential meets (virtual) reality, buyers remorse occurs. As the saying goes, “Hell hath no fury like a gamer scorned.” There is a balance between expectation and reality, and that line has not existed long enough to be clearly defined.

There aren’t enough VR games for me to justify the purchase

Content is king. It doesn’t matter how difficult the development of a piece of media was, it doesn’t matter what the intent behind it is. If it’s good, it’s good. If it’s bad, it’s bad.

But, to a large extent, perception of a product matters as much as the product itself. And if we’ve established anything to far, it’s that VR has a perception problem.

There is an argument that VR doesn’t have enough good games, or even that there are no good VR games. Any other gaming platform has a backlog of dozens, maybe hundreds of classic titles. But VR? Not even close.

Depth of experience

What VR brings to the table is not quantity of experience, but depth of experience.

VR bypasses the screen-brain barrier and goes right for the limbic system. In the way that the loss of a loved one affects you more than the loss of an army, experiences in VR, even small ones, carry more emotional and visceral weight than even the most touching 2D scenes.

Something as simple as opening a drawer in VR involves far more decision making and requires far more physical action than pressing “F” on a keyboard. Every decision has a 1:1 real life analog. Time spent in VR feels like time spent in reality. Seeing someone killed in VR carries a similar emotional weight as it would in real life.

Because of this, VR games can get away with being much shorter than their 2D counterparts. Soldiers coming back from war don’t complain their tour didn’t have enough content.

But from the outside looking in — to someone who has never touched VR — this seems to be a critical flaw. Only a few titles, and most of them under 15 hours of gameplay? Why pay the VR tax when the newest Call of Duty can provide hundreds of hours of satisfaction?

This is, in my opinion, finally touching the core problem with VR adoption. Game reviews talk about the quality of the gameplay loop, they talk about the graphics, the writing, the story — but the thing they never talk about is the depth of the experience.

Does opening a drawer, feel like opening a drawer?

In all our lives, all our thousands of hours of playing games, this concept has never come up. We’ve always danced around it, rating and qualifying the things that contribute to it, but we’ve never just outright said it. And this, more than anything else, is the reason we don’t have the mental tools to grapple with the concept of VR.

VR is cool, but AR is the future

Let’s take a slight turn. There is a veritable reverse card in the arguments against VR — it’s evil mustachioed twin, augmented reality.

AR has an advantage over VR, in that it’s accidentally been slowly introduced to our lives already. Everything from Snapchat filters to the idea of Google Glass has already been with us for far longer than VR headsets have been available.

In any conversation about VR, AR will eventually show up. “AR is the future,” the argument goes. “VR is just the stepping stone.”

I’ve harped on this a lot, but I’m going to keep hammering it home. Humans have a difficult time imagining things beyond our own experiences. The argument for AR is a perfect case in point.

We have a difficult time imagining what it’s like to outsmart a blind man-eating zombie in a refinery, but we have no problem imagining what it’s like to see waypoint markers on our way to work.

AR has been purported to be the next revolution in manufacturing, in aerospace, in sales, in day to day life. Companies like Magic Leap have conjured rumors of demos that bring people to tears.

Well, I say that AR is the true stopgap.

That’s not to say I don’t see any value in AR. After all, it’s already in use for the exact reasons it’s purported to be superior— Google Glass is in use in factories woldwide. It certainly would be nice to be able to read foreign languages or present a product to clients via hologram. I just don’t see the need to augment reality when we already posses the technology to escape it entirely. AR is the 3DTV of the virtual world — for one very large reason.

Put the funny wires in my brain

Brain Computer Interfacing, or BCI is just now entering the public consciousness thanks to companies like Neuralink. But for those in the BCI realm, VR and AR seems rather…boring.

To say that BCI technology is the future is like saying the ocean is damp. It’s true, but it’s not even the first stroke of the full picture. BCI is the technology that obsoletes all technologies — and the tech companies know that.

Both AR and VR are in interesting states. They’ve brought to light the limitations that technology fundamentally suffers from. It doesn’t matter how advanced the device, at some point it always has to translate the actions of animate meat into digital logic. VR highlights this with stunning clarity; even the Valve Index Controllers, with full finger tracking and machine learning-based inverse kinematics can only get frustratingly close to our true intent.

If humans can’t imagine VR, they surely can’t imagine BCI. A Matrix-like reality in which we exist inside machines of our own creation, free to do whatever we want, to create anything we can imagine.

Facebook, Valve, Neuralink, Apple, and others are all spending billions to develop this technology. They’re doing it quietly, in secrecy, each hoping to be the first. BCI is an all or nothing technology. We can buy multiple phones, but we only have one brain.

We’ve talked about the difficulty of marketing VR. That is nothing compared to the difficulty of marketing a BCI. To convince the general populous to let Facebook put a computer in their brain will take more than some clever advertising. It will take a shift in the very nature of human bias.

These companies will need to challenge the foundation of why we, as a race, value privacy. They’ll need to consider thousands of years of societal progress and hundreds of years of industrial and technological revolution to convince us to let them crack our skulls open. From a corporate perspective, it will be the hardest thing they’ve ever done.

But if it can be done — and I’ll be the first in line — maybe humanity can, finally, imagine concepts beyond ourselves.