I'm a software developer and i pass literraly 80% of my time working to make my family survive to this world, and honestly the only thing that i have in mind it's to flippin go in the forest for a walk, i don't understand the thing of wanting so much to be isolated and wear a fucking VR mask, this world is fucked up !
I have an oculus, which I bought mostly out of interest. Not really a gamer.
Anyway, I use it once or twice a month to play a zombie shooting game with my brother, who lives overseas. We shoot zombies for an hour and chat. It feels kind of similar to golfing, bowling or somesuch. We can't do those in person, so we do it in VR.
So for me, VR is kind of a comms tool. A place to catch up. Alternative to video calls. Calling is great, but doing something together it just a normal way of bonding.
As always, the tech is a canvas. You can paint any pictures on it. That said, yeah... This kind of tech & gaming has shown a real proclivity for isolating us from reality and each other.
OOH, I think social VR has a lot of immediate potential, with current and next generation tech. It'll take a while before the user base, hardware, etc. will support blockbuster gaming, films and such. Social stuff can be more lightweight and simple. In that sense, fb is a sensible home for VR.
OTOH, fb's approach to software if goddam awful. Their whole paradigm is making software that makes people do things, not software that people do stuff with. That's likely to tip the balance in the antipattern favour.
VR has much more feeling of "presence" than just video calling, or texting. I've been doing meetings in VR for a few months now and it beats Zoom etc. hands down IMHO, being able to look around, coalesce around a whiteboard, positional audio - it may look a bit cartooney, but for me it's less draining than video conference and more engaging.
Yeah, but I actually think zoom meeting aren't the ideal proving ground. It's a head-2-head between two tools that can do the job, with certain advantages to both.
For hanging out with a younger sibling, zoom doesn't work too well. Video (or audio only) calling enables only a certain kind of interaction. In the physical world,we play tennis, have dinner, cook together, etc. We don't just sit in front of each other and talk intensely all the time.
It seems to me as if you're simply missing the fundamental difference in that you don't understand (likely because you haven't experienced it firsthand with a friend or loved one) the value of physical/social presence enabled by VR. There are two things so far VR does that 2d doesn't, 1) you feel like you are really in the room with someone even if you are not, 2) boobs look 3D in VR porn.
Remarks like these remind me of something John Carmack said in Joe Rogan's interview:
>“There’s this piece of art that goes around the internet of this dystopian kid in a corner, drooling, with goggles on with rainbow pictures and it’s a terrible looking place,” Carmack told Rogan. “And people say, ‘This is the world you’re trying to build, people plugged into virtual reality and ignoring the world around them.’”
>“Is his life really better if he takes them off and he’s in this horrible place?” he asked. “I live in Dallas. It’s 100 degrees there. We change the world around us in all that we do. We live in air-conditioning. People don’t generally go, ‘Oh, you’re not experiencing the world around you because of air-conditioning’ … That is what human beings do, we bend the world to our will.”
I guess it's a matter of perspective but I will say this: I had to isolate myself for months during covid, because of chronic issues that increase the risk of getting ICU'd. And while I missed social contact and leisurely walking under the sun, I can't say that I ever felt imprisoned. If anything, in times like these I would love to have even the emulation of the experience that is walking through a forest without having to worry about my allergies, my joints, snakes or getting lost.
What this all means is that, you're not "better" or "worse" than me for wanting to go in the countryside. You're only different. The whole notion of "you have no life if you work in front of a computer most of the time" was absurd to begin with. How is doing something that I enjoy doing "no life"? The solution to that is simple: Instead of applying societal pressure by pointing out that someone refuses to have a life by focusing too much into games, programming, anime or whatnot to inspect the reasons why they're not attracted to what you claim to be as "having a life".
What I'm saying is, getting out once or twice a week to get my sun exposure for some vitamin D works just fine for me, and I hope people will stop pointing out that "I don't have a life because I prefer X over Y". It's wrong, it's borderline "no true Scotchman" and pivots over the real issue that is respecting people's preferences without feeling that you have "more life" than others.
> And we see that it clearly has a very negative impact overall so idk what kind of argument is that.
You're talking about AC? Surely the climate dialogue hasn't devolved to the point of "uses energy == bad".
We can reflect on its role in shaping society/living spaces and its costs and benefits without being so reductionist.
I really don't think most of the good that comes from tech required the bad enabled by tech.
Humans are just really good at externalizing costs on the environment and on each other.
And enough humans are driven by motivated reasoning so that entire organizations are devoted to disrupting any attempts at fixing things.
Those are human problems. Facebooks social problems are not caused by the evils of digital scrapbooking with reliable write/read coherence over shards. They are the evils of humans redirecting information based on perverse incentives, taking profits from others pain.
It can be a pretty novel experience- neither VR headsets nor walks through a forest are substitutes for each other.
I have access to many many acres of forest, and am quite familiar with it. For reasons unrelated to this discussion, I am unlikely to see many interesting places in person around the world... Pictures are nice, but will never do them justice. I wouldn't mind being able to take a 3d VR tour of them one bit.
Edit: That said, living in VR and never going for a walk through a forest would be utterly dystopian and nightmarish for me. The only thing keeping me from daily walks in the woods right now is hunting season.
In my mind the primary issue is the lack of quality of replication. VR tech is fine, but the quality is just not there. iPhones had a screen quality where you could barely tell there were pixels and eventually got to a high enough quality where no matter how close you looked you couldn’t see the pixels. That is the level of detail needed for VR to be get truly beautiful and our screens and processing power are simply decades away from them, let alone the quality of sound and the other senses.
I don't think any of these things are substitutes for each other. A book about the arctic is not an alternative to a visit. It's a substitute for another book, maybe.
The main way VFR competes with other stuff is competition for time, in the sense that TV, social media and such are.
This isn't for you. It's for the current generation of kids who've grown up having their attention spans destroyed by having a screen in front of them their whole lives.
A good chunk of them live online, having parasocial relationships with Twitch streamers and Youtubers, or buying skins to put on their characters in Fortnite. I have almost no idea what Roblox and Minecraft are besides world building, but kids get addicted to that too.
This reads very much like a “kids these days!” Complaint lodged against the next generation since time immemorial. Sure, some parasocial relationships can be harmful, and video game addiction is something to watch out for (though I’m not sure why you singled out Minecraft and Roblox specifically, they’re just fun creative games), but there’s nothing preventing a healthy balance of screen time, activities, and outdoor time with a bit of parental guidance.
If I had a kid, I’d be encouraging them to play Minecraft. I’m 25, and played during the very early days around 2009. I can’t see a way in which Minecraft was anything but good for my brain.
I regret the amount of my teens that I spent playing video games in general, but I don’t regret Minecraft. It’s such a genuinely positive and constructive experience in its openness. It’s like life - there’s no endgame or goal. No single way to play. You can decide you want to build a megabase connected by rail, you can decide you want to terraform a mountain, you can build crazy automatic machines to grow food or kill enemies for you. But it’s your choice, the game doesn’t push you in any direction outside of the very early game.
It also served as my introduction to computing - the in game wiring system is Turing complete. I learned about logic gates from Minecraft.
Yeah as a trail runner and technologist, I enjoy VR but I'm not sure anything could replace the sights, smells, and feeling of going on a run through the woods. Similarly I think there is room for both VR-sports (and e-sports) and traditional IRL athletics. One doesn't replace the other, but the skills, strategy, physical performance and endurance are very different to watch and to experience (each great/ fascinating in their own way).
Physical and virtual sports are similar in most regards, except when it comes to environmental impact. Taking a walk/swim in nature does little to no damage to your environment, unless you make it a big competition.
In comparison, any computerized activity will require tons of resources (and related industrial pollution) and slave labor to produce the hardware you're using, and more energy/resources to power the device. I'm not against video games, but do we need more hardware? Our hardware is extremely powerful already (though games are rarely optimized in any way) and as much as i can see human progress via Internet connectivity, i don't see any "usefulness" for VR technology: it seems to me that apart from requiring more hardware and potentially fueling gaming addictions and social isolation, there is little to no value proposition compared to Second Life and other software we've had for decades.
Nobody really wants that; which I think is what Facebook is missing (sorry, not calling them Meta just like
we still call Alphabet Google). I personally like VR, but in no way do I think it’s a replacement for the real world. For me, it’s just a more immersive video game experience that I can only handle for about an hour at a time.
IMO Facebook wants you to experience life entirely though their platform, because once you take a step back you realize that Facebook is this weird alternate world where everyone is angry all the time, truth has no meaning and there are no social norms.
Meanwhile, when you DO step back into real life, you realize many of the people who probably want to murder you online are perfectly nice in person. Or that most of the people you talk to on Facebook are people you used to be friends with but would never make time to see in real life because you’re not that close anymore. And that Facebook might not be reflective of reality, which threatens their engagement metrics. So they want to shape your reality to be less threatening to them. I couldn’t think of a more dystopian concept — fortunately the value proposition is not appealing to most.
I agree with you completely. It actually makes me angry that corporations will seemingly stop at nothing to rape the Earth for their own profit and control. They want to
replace everything natural and beautiful with a cheap simulacrum, and hope that the SSRIs and porn keep the population complacent while they take everything away from them.
Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it's "fucked up". Do you think that about all things not aligned with your personal and subjective preferences?
I agree totally. All I want is to be more efficient at work and reduce the screen time so I can enjoy what the real world offers. Taking the red pill guys, not the blue pills!
VR has been a bust because decent VR requires a heavy thing attached to your head, basically an empty room in your house, and a computer that (at least pre-covid auto prices) cost more than many of the cars on the road in the United States.
My friend has had a vive for years, he has an entire room dedicated to it so you can actually walk around. Its being driven by a several thousand dollar computer and makes the room unusable for anything else as you have to keep the floor vacant so you can actually walk around. If I had a room to spare, and 5-6k dollars to drop, I'd have it but when you're taking home about $500 a week and don't have an empty room...
The cheaper options, where you're just sitting on your couch, aren't nearly as engaging or interesting (at least to me). Another thing to consider is how many people wear glasses, and how poorly these things work while wearing glasses because they mask them into your face and/or fog. If I want to get custom lens inserts, I'm looking at another $300-500 cost every 12-18 months (that's assuming any can actually accommodate my astigmatism and the prism requirements I need).
And all that money is for a VR that doesn’t fully replicate normal vision - the number of pixels is just not there yet. I doubt even quadrupoling the number of pixels in current vr systems would get there.
That's definitely better pricing than I found last time I looked, my lenses end up being $163. My left sphere adds $7 and both cylinders add $19 each + $49 for the prism.
Whether or not more and more people will be unemployed or not due to advances in technology and shifts in society is probably up to debate. I personally think that we'll see more unemployment with uneducated folks. And even if they work it will be paid badly, unstable due to being easily replaceable and rather stressful and dull.
Same for having a family. Finding a spouse will be difficult for the disposable and getting children risky. So, also not an option for many.
And access to a forest - as in a place with nature where you can walk for half an hour without meeting anyone. Good luck with that living in the middle of some ghetto without public or individual transportation options.
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Those products will be the new Opium for the People. The new couch with chips in front of the TV. A sedation and escapism.
I share your feeling, but most people i know who grew up in the big cities don't even have any form of connection with or appreciation for nature. It's just not part of their "natural environment".
Nation States and corporations have rendered the western world so meaningless and painful that most of us will do anything to get out of it for a while... whether it's via drugs or VR or whatever means at our disposal.
it’s strange, i think it’s because the fact the we work with computers all day, to others it’s play time because it doesn’t remind them of fixing bugs or working with spreadsheets all day
