Virtual Reality Fails Its Way to Success (original) (raw)
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The Innovations Issue
The Oculus Rift, virtual-reality goggles.Credit...Jens Mortensen for The New York Times
- Nov. 14, 2014
Of all the praise heaped upon Oculus, the virtual-reality company that Facebook acquired for $2 billion earlier this year, perhaps the most significant has been this: non-nauseating. I can testify to that after my visit last month to the groovy downtown Manhattan offices of Relevent, a marketing agency that has created a virtual-reality demo for HBO to help promote its hit series “Game of Thrones.” Without much small talk, Ian Cleary, Relevent’s vice president of “innovation and ideation,” escorted me into a steampunk cage the size of a phone booth, made of iron and wood. He fitted me with headphones and the Oculus Rift, as the company’s flagship product is called, a blocky set of black maxigoggles with an internal screen positioned inches from the eyes. I promptly lost awareness of the screen, and after a few seconds, a bass speaker under the floorboards began to boom. All I knew next was that I was shooting up, as in an outdoor elevator, to a windy summit and then trudging through lightly packed snow — crunch, crunch, crunch — onto a vertiginous ledge of ice.
I didn’t turn my head. I felt paralyzed and choiceless, simultaneously propelled and enfeebled, as if I were being walked in a Baby Bjorn. Nervously laughing, I spoke aloud, shouting as if over wind: “I am in an office in Manhattan. Everything is fine. It is a workday!” I did this because I was fooled, profoundly fooled, and I needed to remind myself — and the P.R. team I half-remembered was watching me — that I wasn’t six inches from extinction.
Immersive, transporting, revolutionary. But most of all, non-nauseating. That’s the term that sets the Oculus Rift apart from the long line of demoralizing virtual-reality Edsels that preceded it. The chief asset of the Rift — more than its dazzling specs, more than Facebook’s sizable investment in it — is its dignified, non-emetic quality. All hail: the Oculus Rift doesn’t make you vomit.
And for this particular technology, that’s a crowning achievement. In 2012, when Palmer Luckey, Oculus’s founder, presented his homemade V.R. headset at the New Frontier program at the Sundance Film Festival, I was eager to try it. After donning the D.I.Y. unit — which was held together with gaffer’s tape and loaded up with “Hunger in Los Angeles,” a haunting immersive-journalism project by a writer named Nonny de la Peña — I fell sick. Sick unto death, or so it seemed. The first thing that deserted me was interest in the spectacle; my own biological crisis monopolized my curiosity. The word “rift” thrummed in my swimming head. Uncanny illusions produced by the Oculus headset had indeed cleaved an unbridgeable rift between the evidence of my senses and an awareness of space and time deeper in my body.
This was not good. In seconds, cognitive dissonance turned into something existential: bona fide Sartrian nausée. To hell with politeness. I ripped off my helmet and speed-walked, sheet white, past the art crowd at Sundance, in panicked search of a place to vomit. It took me several days to get my equilibrium back. And two years to try virtual reality again.
From the academic experiments and aerospace simulators of the 1960s to the Sega VR headset, Nintendo’s Virtual Boy and the Virtuality arcade games of the 1990s, virtual reality has always sounded fantastic in theory but felt in practice like brain poison. No wonder the progress of V.R. technology went more or less dark between 1998, when V.R. arcade games petered out, and 2012, when Oculus started to make Kickstarter rounds. Virtual reality was an abject failure right up to the moment it wasn’t. In this way, it has followed the course charted by a few other breakout technologies. They don’t evolve in an iterative way, gradually gaining usefulness. Instead, they seem hardly to advance at all, moving forward in fits and starts, through shame spirals and bankruptcies and hype and defensive crouches — until one day, in a sudden about-face, they utterly, totally win.
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