What are your predictions for virtual reality that you expect to see during your lifetime?

Here are some statements to get you started. Pick a statement or statements that you strongly agree with and enter your comment on the Discussion Board.

  • VR will someday replace reality.
  • VR will never replace reality.
  • VR challenges the concept of reality.
  • VR will enable us to rediscover and explore reality.
  • VR is a safe substitute for drugs and sex.
  • VR is pleasure without risk and therefore immoral.
  • VR will enhance the mind, leading us to new powers.
  • VR is addictive and will enslave us.
  • VR is a radically new experience.
  • VR is as old as Paleolithic art.
  • VR is basically a computer technology.
  • All forms of representation create a VR experience.
  • VR undermines the distinction between fiction and reality.
  • VR is the triumph of fiction over reality.
  • VR is the art of the twenty-first century, as cinema was for the twentieth.
  • VR is pure hype and ten years from now will be no more than a footnote in the history of culture and technology.

What are your predictions for virtual reality that you expect to see during your lifetime? Here are some statements to get you started. Pick a statement or statements that you strongly agree with and
THE AGE OF VIRTUAL REALITY I. INTRODUCTION his is the Age of Virtual Reality. Writers are witnessing “something huge . . . running beneath the radar.”1 Ray Kurzweil, the respected author, inventor, and futurist, claims this moment in history will end 6,000 years of “civilization” as we have known it.2 And other well-known writers on Virtual Reality agree something big is happening. This “something” is slipping up on us suddenly—exponentially. For history has rapidly increased its tempo. Everything’s happening in an expanded now. Kurzweil claims technological progress in this century will be 1,000 times greater than in the last century. Time, in other words, has become “exponential.” Kurzweil explains it this way: “With 30 steps, you get to 30.” “With 30 exponential steps, you get to one billion.” And it’s not just the tempo that catches our breath. The changes within this acceleration even shock our sense of normalcy. For Virtual Reality—as a full-fledged, in-your-face, surrogate reality—is overthrowing the way we think. It’s altering our 1 Hayes, Tom – Jump Point: How Network Culture is Revolutionizing Business (McGraw-Hill, 2008) p. 218. 2 Ray Kurzweil, “Accelerated Living,” PC Magazine, Vol. 20, No. 15, September 4, 2001, pp. 151-153. T The Age of Virtual Reality 2 awareness of reality itself.3 Tomorrow we will suddenly see that everything has changed. What we see today is only the beginning. lready, this phenomenon claims an all-at-once-everywhere presence. Already, for example, it drives the global economy. Virtual Reality (VR), in the form of entertainment—not autos, steel, nor financial services—is “becoming the driving wheel of the new world economy.”4 And professionals in all fields are finding VR a necessity. Surgeons rehearse their operations on “virtual patients.” Architects “walk through” their buildings before they become actual structures. And “graphic artists, designers, virtual physicists, cognitive psychologists, development psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, ethicists” and other interdisciplinary scholars hang their hopes on VR.5 Suddenly, we all share a new philosophy: “Staying connected is good; not staying connected is bad.” Social networking, cell phones, and unlimited texting is pervasive. Indeed, worldwide mobile data traffic compounds at an “annual growth rate of 92 percent.”6 3 Michael Heim, Virtual Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) p. 140. 4 Michael J. Wolf, quoted in Phil Cooke, Branding Faith (Scottsdale, Arizona: Regal Publications, 2008) p. 25. 5 Mychilo S. Cline, Power, Madness, and Immortality: The Future of Virtual Reality (S. I.: University Village Press, 2005) p. 177. 6 Kurzweil, http://tinyurl.com/4asco5l A I. Introduction 3 So Civilization leans precipitously toward a virtual world. We could call it a “migration,” or even an “exodus.” “People are spending more time in media and especially screen media than anything else they’re doing in life (emphasis added).”7 “There are enough consumers of video games to fill auditoriums and even stadiums to hear orchestral renditions of game soundtracks. Video Games Live! is one such event that calls itself an immersive event, because the combination of live music, video, game playing, and pyrotechnics consumes all your senses and your total attention.”8 So VR is here! And it’s everywhere! Even the term “virtual” has become surprisingly common. We have “virtual universities, virtual offices, virtual pets, virtual actors, virtual museums, virtual doctors—and all because of virtual reality.”9 hat’s driving this phenomenon? The answer begins with serious money and serious weapons. Both big business and the U. S. military have pushed most of the research and innovation involving VR. The Internet, for example, came into being because of national security. But profit and security are only part of this historical event. 7 Bill Moult of Sequent Partners quoted in Higgins, Adrian, “We can’t see the forest for the T-Mobiles” Washington Post, Tuesday, December 15, 2009; C01. (My italics) 8 Tom Hayes, quoted in http://www.davidmays.org/BN/HayJump.html 9 John Vince, Introduction to Virtual Reality, Product view in: http://tinyurl.com/3p55jra W The Age of Virtual Reality 4 Today’s youth also drive it forward. They reveal an innate affinity with altered futures. Their pop culture exudes a passion for something “out there.” Their fluid and eclectic lives move easily in a dynamic and spontaneous universe. They love breaking boundaries and overcoming constraints. Regardless of political, geographical, and ethnic divides, today’s youth revel in an “anything goes” world. VR, after all, “expands the process of creation (and) opens up the future.”10 These fast-tracking futurists welcome reaching faster and farther to everyone and everything. They celebrate their triumph over the tyrannies of Time and Space. They welcome the collective conversations of a new coexistence—the creative collaborations of a new consensus. Indeed, their world resembles a “global human brain” in which the simultaneous firing of millions of “synapses” creates new patterns of “emerging” thought. Their universe has become a World Wide Web in which organic self-organization creates endless connections. The young are less and less patient with passive obeisance to television. They prefer to participate. They want to be on the “doing” and “sharing” end of modern media. As a result, TV finds itself just moments away from becoming a participative experience. The TV moguls have no choice but to follow their lead or become obsolete. Among this new generation we find today’s cyber geeks and tech artists, the prophets of VR. They have one foot in the real world, the other in a fantasy one.11 The new generation wields 10 Pierre Lévy, quoted in Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) pp. 35-37. 11 Booklist Review of Ethan Gilsdorf, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online I. Introduction 5 the power of graphics and games. They rule the world in which we all will live some day, and we have crowned these digital “deities” with uninhibited legitimacy. till other events explode the VR “happening.” Western Civilization, for example, has returned to an oral culture. In oral cultures, truth and information moves through stories, songs, rituals, and dances. Its participants know the imagination, feeling, and power that flow from nonliteral images and the call to participate. “Two-thirds of the world’s population, either by necessity or choice, are oral communicators, and they are found in every cultural group in the world.”12 In other words, communication is increasingly nonliteral and interactive. In this book, we’ll see that this description becomes part of the very definition of VR. Like oral communities, especially those of old, it is not surprising that our digitally savvy youth choose the compelling mystery of a fantasy world over their mediocre and mundane “real” world. For many, VR “makes reality seem like a poor substitute for the realms of the imagination.”13 Amazingly, traditional scholars and artists prod them on. For conventional intellectuals have rediscovered a “metaphor” that lies beyond a mere figure of speech. In a language identical to VR, this metaphor turns out to be the building block for all the ____________________ Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms http://tinyurl.com/3dz283f 12 “Orality,” Search.Com Reference, http://tinyurl.com/44puz58 13 Pagan Kennedy’s review of Gilsdorf, http://tinyurl.com/3zr4nyz S The Age of Virtual Reality 6 arts,14 the only hope for abstract thought,15 and “the most fertile power possessed by man.”16 urely we understand by now that we’re living a lifestyle of serious make-believe. It’s an “intuitive leap over the traditional step-by-step logical chain.”17 Our musing mind operates beyond conventional constraints. VR draws us into a type of reflective thinking that flows from nonliteral images and the call to participate. Through VR, we contemplate the unknown more than the known, the awe more than the ordinary, the mystery more than the mundane. We watch the instinct more than the intellect, the content more than the form, the message more than the medium. We feel the ecstasy more than the discipline, the compelling more than the control, the artistry more than the technique. In other words, VR marks a major shift from informed opinion to inspired intuition and from the literate to the visionary. It seems people no longer live doctrines. They live VR. They no longer find renewal in the didactic, instructional rhetoric of Western ethics. They find it in VR. It’s too late to tie them to the last “official” answer. Consider, for example, how they review 14 Carl Hausman, Metaphor and art: Interactionism and Reference in the Verbal and Nonverbal Arts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989) pp. 5, 111, 198. 15 Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1999) pp. 58, 59. 16 José Ortega y Gasset, GoodReads, http://tinyurl.com/4xjuuoj 17 Heim, p. 96. S I. Introduction 7 their reviewers—comment on their commentators—create shows about shows—read news commentary about news—follow TV guides about TV. They link, link, link, and their “evidence” becomes a simulation of a simulation of a simulation. This brings with it, of course, blurring boundaries between “reality” and “virtual reality.” It creates a fuzzy feedback loop between the actual and the imagined. In this refuge of fantasy, we feel an increasing tension between fact and fiction, technology and art, real space and cyberspace, real time and “real time.” It is a tautological dialogic that can easily confuse or disorient virtual reality’s participants as it bends and distorts our sense of reality. Since VR embeds itself in today’s sensuous technologies, we live the duality of science and sense—the fusion of facts and feelings. Indeed, we are becoming cyborgs!—blending cyb(ernetics) with our org(anism). How often we collide with spacey pedestrians wearing an iPod over one ear and a cell phone over the other. Still more amazing, VR is not so virtual anymore. Companies are paying real money for virtual real estate, and they are making real money from virtual commerce. Surfers and gamers are spending real time—dozens of hours each week—in virtual environments. Couples are finding real love without having ever met. And our soldiers are playing video games with real results, flying real airplanes (drones) on the other side of the Earth and killing real people. We can’t call it “virtual” anymore. ommunication—including everyday language—further confirms these facts. Language has always been about the sharing of symbols and meanings, and today’s lingua franca is no different. Worldwide communication increasingly reflects the C The Age of Virtual Reality 8 language of VR. Its virtual venue has become the “turf of choice” upon which people collaborate.18 This should not surprise us. Language has always changed, and it’s quickly changing in this century. Through the ages, the way we think has faithfully reflected the tools we use to think with. Writing, for example, has restructured the “realities” of entire civilizations. That’s why people differ among differing cultures. “For 500 years, Western culture has been a ‘left-brain,’ print-based, communication culture. But now technology is rapidly changing this ‘print culture.’ When the medium changes, the message is changed too.”19 For instance, VR is becoming the “dominant communication system of our culture,”20 but we are talking about more than “communication.” Both online and offline, VR is ushering in the world in which we will live. For the moment, it’s an “alternative world.” Yet, for those who spend most of their waking lives in VR, it has become a “habitat.” And for the rest of us, it is not far-fetched to suggest we are gradually migrating into virtual space, whether we are ready or not. e are not ready for this journey! We have neither the skills nor the caution to “call those things that be not as though they were.”21 VR, after all, is not a safe zone. Every advancement in technology both gives and gets. Further, there will always be 18 Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (New York: Random House, 2007) p. 122. 19 Hipps, Shane, Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009) pp. 42-44. 20 Hipps, p. 17. 21 Romans 4:17, King James Version of The New Testament. W I. Introduction 9 VR gurus who are driven by greed. There will always be those who seek power and control over others. So it is important to make ready by exploring the protean parameters of virtual reality, which is what this book sets out to do. A book about VR challenges any author. In the first place, this era has already proven an unstable moment. Ours is a postmodernist world where certainty has been shattered. In other words, we face the ontological crisis of trying to establish reality: “How do we know that we know?” Meaning has become fluid, constantly changing. Everything is “subjective.” Secondly, VR has become “one of the most bizarre phenomena of the twenty-first century.”22 For example, it is “the first intellectual technology that permits the active use of the body in the search for knowledge.”23 As a result, we stagger under a subject that seems strange, exotic, and even alien to traditional thinkers. This book, however, promises a new veracity, a new authenticity, and a new credibility for the virtual experience. In other words, readers will learn to test, discern, and ground the “evidence” of their experience, and they will learn to use this experience creatively in a world that demands their participation. 22 Tim Guest, Second Lives: A Journey Through Virtual Worlds (New York: Random House, 2008) Product description: http://tinyurl.com/6m559v 23 Heim, pp. vii, viii.

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