I hear a bright tone – ding! – and then the elevator doors open to reveal a vast cityscape stretching out before my eyes. Protruding in front of me is a wooden board, about three metres long and thirty centimetres wide – just thick enough to accommodate both of my feet, side-by-side. The task here is straightforward: just like the maritime method of execution, I’m meant to walk the plank.
First, I must step up onto the board. I tentatively put my left foot forward, seeking the raised edge. I shift my weight and bring my right foot up to the timber. What’s most surprising is the immediate physical response that I encounter: my heart beats noticeably faster beneath my ribcage, and I begin sweating. My brain has suddenly thrown my balance into question, because never before in my regular life have I found it so hard to put one foot in front of the other.
Heights have been problematic for me in the past: when I moved into a seventh-floor apartment in 2015, it took weeks for me to be able to stand by the edge of the balcony without gripping the railing or leaning backwards, away from the void. I had supposed this was an inherent self-preservation instinct retained from my ancient ancestors, who were smart enough to stay away from high places in favour of keeping contact with the earth. In the parlance of software development, I rationalised that this inbuilt aversion to heights was a feature, not a bug.
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Walking the virtual and literal plank.
A helicopter passes overhead, not far from where I’m standing. Out on the plank, eighty storeys in the air, I’m holding the two wireless controllers up above my waist, like ski poles. This is mostly for balance, I suppose, but also because my mind has been gripped by a set of emotions that I’ve yet to encounter in any other form of visual entertainment. It’s a cocktail of fear, exhilaration and anxiety, and it’s because my eyes and ears are taking in sensations which I know intellectually to be false. This is virtual reality, after all, and I’m playing a game named Richie’s Plank Experience. Yet out here, on the plank, real and fake are all but indistinguishable. All my brain is concerned with is survival.
“I only manage to shuffle about halfway across the length of the plank before giving in to the fear. My heart pounds, my skin prickles with sweat, and I’m completely out of my comfort zone… It’s simply too real.”
I only manage to shuffle about halfway across the length of the plank before giving in to the fear. My heart pounds, my skin prickles with sweat, and I’m completely out of my comfort zone. Before I put on the headset and headphones, I was just another guy standing in a building near the Brisbane River, watching a bunch of strangers attempt to walk a board that sits just a few centimetres off the ground, held aloft at one end by a hardcover copy of Steve Jobs, and a few stacked kitchen sponges at the other. Yet even after having watched these interactions and reactions play out on the faces of strangers, I was completely unprepared for the sensory overload that comes wrapped in the immersion. It’s simply too real.
With careful consideration, I remove my right foot from the timber and reach out into space. For a moment, this act sends my mind reeling once again, and I give a clumsy shimmy from my hip before moving my left foot off the edge, too. For about four seconds, I fall toward the hard bitumen and slow-moving inner-city traffic. I turn my head to take in the last sights I’ll ever see. When I hit the ground, everything turns white.
There’s video footage of my first time with this game: putting on the headset, tentatively edging up to the timber, and spending a few anxious moments standing out above the cityscape before deciding to step off. From start to finish, it takes about two minutes. Beside me stands Richard Eastes, the game’s Brisbane-based creator. Between occasional sips of beer, the man in flip-flops, polo shirt and shorts is tasked with ensuring that I don’t do anything sudden or stupid in the real world, like jump into a nearby metal railing. At the far end of the board is his striking wife, Toni, whose natural facial expression rests on a smile.
Arranged as part of the Brisbane VR Club’s monthly meet-up, held at the Brisbane Powerhouse, this HTC Vive hardware installation is a chance for curious strangers to try something new in a central location at zero cost. Nearby, club attendees chat over drinks, oblivious to my mental gymnastics.
While writing this story, I watch the clip on loop, and I’m transfixed by the paradox: how something so mundane as walking on a plank of wood can totally change my perception and understanding of everything that has gone before, if only for a few moments. Even during those two minutes, I kept trying to tell myself that it wasn’t real. The disconnect between my intellectual understanding and emotional response was enormous.
Despite being a lifelong gamer who has invested thousands upon thousands of hours of my life into staring into television and computer screens while controlling virtual avatars, I was still stupefied and, essentially, defeated by the novelty of Richie’s Plank Experience.
The thing about novelty, though, is that it operates according to the law of diminishing returns: once you try something for the first time, you’re already on the path to normalisation. Later, after my heartrate returns to its baseline, I jump back into the game to try its other modes, which are much less fear-inducing.
One prompts your creative urges by allowing you to use a jetpack to paint shapes mid-air, out between the tall buildings; it’s rather difficult, and gives me new appreciation for the task of sky-writing. The other mode encourages you to use a firehose to put out a burning building: virtual firefighting, a hundred metres up. All of it is rendered in vivid, colourful, and strikingly realistic tones. There is no need to suspend my disbelief, because the brain immediately believes – hence the physical response.
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Source: IGN