quotations about virtual reality
The thing that's remarkably beautiful to me about virtual reality is that you can make up reality in virtual reality and share it with other people. It's like having a collaborative lucid dream.
JARON LANIER
interview, Whole Earth Review, 1989
"Virtual reality" is currently used to describe an increasingly wide array of computer-generated or mediated environments, experiences and activities ranging from the near ubiquity of video games, to emerging technologies such as tele-immersion, to technologies still only dreamed of in science fiction and only encountered in the novels of William Gibson or Orson Scott Card, on the Holodeck of television's Star Trek, or at the movies in The Matrix of the Wachowski brothers, where existing VR technologies make possible a narrative about imagined VR technologies. The term "virtual reality" covers all of this vast, and still rapidly expanding, terrain.
DEREK STANOVSKY
The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information
Trying to showcase VR to someone through a traditional ad is like trying to explain the fourth dimension with a Tesseract, you may give them an idea but there's no way for them to truly understand without experiencing it.
WILL MASON
"Research Shows You May Be Key to VR's Success", Upload, January 29, 2016
Virtual reality was supposed to be the next big thing. That was the message the tech industry peddled for years. But despite all of the hype, consumers just don't seem as excited as many would have hoped. There are the obvious reasons: the gear is expensive, headsets are clunky and image quality is still nowhere near that of movies or console games. But the biggest obstacle to VR's mainstream adoption is not its tangible limitations, but rather, the fact that the experiences it affords are isolating and lonely.
RAMONA PRINGLE
"Virtual reality is still too isolating to be the next big thing in tech", CBC News, February 14, 2017
It is a conundrum. If you're going to make the virtual experience so good, why should you have to go to Hawaii to experience it. How do you entice people to go if in fact they can see everything they want to see virtually?
JIM BLASCOVICH
"Virtual Paradise Aims To Lure New Tourists", Hawaii Public Radio, September 29, 2016
Virtual reality true believers ... are dismissive of the idea that AR might outrun VR as a blockbuster consumer technology. Augmented reality requires too much training for the average consumer to learn how to integrate the digital images into the real world.... Mixing the virtual world and the real world is less natural.... Simply popping on a headset and diving into a completely virtual environment is, somewhat counter-intuitively, easier.
JEREMY KAHN
"Virtual Reality Companies Navigate 'The Trough of Disillusionment'", Bloomberg, April 20, 2017
What is virtual reality, but the Spotify of human experience?
BEN KUCHERA
"IdeaFestival: Exploring Virtual Reality", Insider Louisville, September 29, 2016
Being virtually killed by virtual laser in virtual space is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as you think you are.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
Mostly Harmless
The brain often fails to differentiate between virtual experiences and real ones. The patterns of neurons that fire when one watches a three-dimensional digital re-creation of a supermodel, such as Giselle or Fabio, are very similar--if not identical--to those that fire in the actual presence of the models. Walking a tightrope over a chasm in virtual reality can be a terrifying ordeal even if the walker knows it's virtual rather than physical.
JIM BLASCOVICH & JEREMY BAILENSON
Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution
Virtual reality is fun, but it isn't always easy. The headsets that immerse you in fantastic worlds and experiences also cut you off from the outside world. Since the more affordable headgear, like the original Google Cardboard and Samsung's popular Gear VR, lacked controllers, they made your feel like you were sticking your head in amazing box while your hands were left out and mostly useless to you.
LANCE ULANOFF
"Samsung Gear VR and Controller are the perfect virtual match", Mashable, April 18, 2017
I started looking at small companies that were running a sort of virtual reality cottage industry: I had imagined that I would just put on a helmet and be somewhere else - that's your dream of what it's going to be.
THOMAS DOLBY
attributed, Litera
We will all have superpowers. Because in virtual reality you can be anyone, you can go anywhere, and you can create anything.
RIKARD STEIBER
"Virtual reality: Is this really how we will all watch TV in years to come?", The Guardian, April 8, 2017
V.R. is a mutual technology that can be applied and molded into anything we want. If we have any hope to heal as a country, we need a bar that's not defined by geography.
CODY BROWN
"Cody Brown Has a Broad Vision for Virtual Reality", New York Times, April 5, 2017
We're in the Pong stage of virtual reality. Basically, we hit photorealism in games almost 10 years ago. So in 35 years, we went from blocky quarter-inch pixels of Pong, to photorealism. It's only reasonable to assume that we can do the same thing with virtual reality.
NOLAN BUSHNELL
attributed, "We Have Virtual Reality. What's Next Is Straight Out Of The Matrix", Digital Trends, December 19, 2016
Virtual reality is in a paradoxical relationship with the real. On the one hand, it is part of the real; yet, on the other, it has to be constructed as different from the real in order to be perceived as separate from it. Thus, virtual reality consists of a dichotomous paradox, torn between its ontological status which locates it as a part of the real and its aesthetic, through which it demonstrates its difference from the real.
GABRIELLA GIANNACHI
Virtual Theatres
The computer is a protean technology; virtual reality is a protean medium. As virtual environments begin to diffuse throughout society, the range of these systems will be quite broad. The categories proposed here will certainly increase in complexity. The categories of components and the distinctions among systems will multiply as the virtual environment marketplace bursts into a kaleidoscope of applications and options. Like the microchip, a version of this medium may find its way into almost every form of mediated communication. From the low-end to the high-end system, various configurations of these components may grow to simulate every communication channel from a handshake, to a book, to the video image.
FRANK BIOCCA & BEN DELANEY
"Immersive Virtual Reality Technology"
You look at VR, it just ... died. We're not building on a decade of small improvements. We're kind of starting from scratch here. It's unlikely that the first things to come out in that range of consumer devices are going to be the iPhone. The iPhone moment is going to take longer, and it's probably not going to be such a huge, radical jump, it's going to be more gradual. The [Oculus] Rift is not the "iPhone of VR." Nothing out there is "the iPhone of VR." They're almost like the Palm Pilots and the Treos of virtual reality.
PALMER LUCKEY
interview, re/code, June 19, 2015
Years from now, we will be experimenting with something that was sparked by VR, and we will be reshaping the creative process again--a cycle that should be nontraditional in its roots, just like what VR is bringing in our creative processes with clients today.
RESH SIDHU
"Virtual Reality Is A Renegade Technology That's Disrupting The Creative Process", Fastco Create, December 28, 2016
We are producing a generation of cyborg-style kids -- always plugged into something -- and it will do no good.
LEONA O'NEILL
"Being plugged into virtual reality is giving us a generation of cyborg kids", Irish News, September 13, 2016
As a mere substitute of reality, a mask of the truth that hides behind its signs, virtual reality is not different from any other semiotic code: a mixture of conventional and iconic (mimetic) signs, both being signifiers of reality, the reality being the signified. And yet virtual reality claims to be much more than mimesis and representation. Virtual reality is a simulation of reality that demands to be experienced as a total replacement of reality itself. Whoever approaches virtual reality's environment as a totalizing experience is hanging on the balance of such duplicity. On the one hand, one knows perfectly well that what he or she is experiencing is not real. On the other hand, the temptation to call it another reality (if not a self-sufficient reality) is very strong. Virtual reality is not just an experience that creates a new fragment of reality: the degree of participation involved is so high that it displaces nonvirtual reality.
ALESSANDRO CARRERA
"The Rise and Fall of Reality", Between Philosophy and Poetry