Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announces the launch of Oculus Go virtual reality headset in October. (Handout)
Last month, Facebook-owned virtual reality company, Oculus, announced its new device, Oculus Go.
Go, the successor to Oculus Rift, is a cheaper standalone virtual reality (VR) headset and controller system set for release in 2018. The company boasts that the new system allows users to immerse themselves in over 1,000 games, social apps and 360˚ experiences, and step inside a personal portable theatre to watch movies, TV shows, sports and play games.
At a much lower cost than the previous iteration (US$199 compared to $599 for the Oculus Rift), Oculus Go is likely to become very popular.
Similarly, Microsoft partners, including Acer, Dell, HP and Lenovo, announced their own headsets in the US$299 to $530 range, built to the technology giant’s specifications. And Google announced its $99 Daydream View — up in price from $79 for the previous smartphone-headset model.
These increasingly affordable devices are likely to excite many. But VR has long been a part of our popular culture. Throughout its history, new VR technologies have forced us to ask questions about its impact on culture and society.
In my research on media, popular culture and ideology, I’ve traced some of the ways that new media have changed how we see and experience reality.
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Acer is one of several Microsoft partners launching consumer-priced mixed-reality headsets. (Handout)
VR in popular culture
Following the arrival of photography in the 1830s, the diorama, and then the panorama, were built structures that reproduced scenes made to look like the real world. Panoramas and dioramas are still used in shopping malls, window displays, museums and galleries to emulate the appearance of the traditional town square.
The arrival of cinema, and then television, truly gave us a new sense of VR. Movies and TV brought scenes, fantasies and fictions closer to us.
The way we tend to imagine new fully immersive VR technology has come from its depiction in popular literature, film and television.
William Gibson’s novel, Neuromancer (1984), deals with a VR “cyberspace” environment called “the matrix.” The book is a precursor to the 1999 film, The Matrix. Other popular sci-fi and cyberpunk films in the 1990s also portray the arrival of immersive VR. These films include Brett Leonard’s The Lawnmower Man (1992), Josef Rusnak’s The Thirteenth Floor(1999), David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999) and Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995).
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Donald Trump political adviser Kellyanne Conway coined the term “alternative facts.”
Part of the problem with social media is that it produces information bubbles. Because of the algorithmic logic of the platform, people end up trapped in feedback loops of information. Users end up only seeing information in their newsfeeds that reinforces — rather than combats or contradicts — their own world views. Because of this, social media seems to have created more opinion-based segregation in society. This flies in the face of the more traditional democratic notion of the public sphere.
In the democratic public sphere, people are supposed to come together to engage in critical rational debate. Instead, corporate new media offers users safe spaces of rhetorical support for their existing conceptions of reality.
Both sides of the story
There is also a parallel that runs here with the meaning of “objectivity” in the media — of reporting fairly and without bias. But misconceptions about “objective journalism” might add to the problem. People think that objectivity means showing “both sides” of the story. But what if one side is factually false?
A good example is climate change and the debate between climate scientists, who research the human causes of climate change, and those who deny the “human footprint” in climate change, ignoring the overwhelming majority of research that supports the climate science.
The new U.S. ambassador to Canada, Kelly Craft, has said that she believes “both sides” of the climate science. But this raises the question: If “objectivity” is merely the attempt to give legitimacy equally to different “views,” what then is the impact on reality? Does this mean that there is no single reality? No single, objective truth?
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Father John Misty’s “Total Entertainment Forever” cautions against the perils of virtual reality.
Misty (whose real name is Josh Tillman) sings about the darker side of our emerging new media and entertainment technologies. The song itself is a testament to our over-investment in entertainment and its ability to obscure reality.
As new media and entertainment technologies are normalized, they tend to have an impact on the way that we experience actual reality. This is not to suggest that our entertainment technologies are necessarily dangerous, or that we face a moral conundrum as we enjoy new media.
But it’s worth asking how our mediated practices of enjoyment in the virtual world still have real-world social and political implications.
As VR technologies like Oculus Go become more popular, we might ask ourselves how our immersion in its world of high-definition simulation impacts our experiences of reality.
As we’ve already witnessed through the political implications of Facebook, and its difficulty with so-called “fake news,” such a question is not entirely politically neutral.
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Source: The Conversation