Is Oculus Rift the end of humanity as we know it?

Modern 3D video games already immerse people for hours at a time. A complete virtual reality with intuitive controls could lock people in an impulsive cycle so powerful, they may see no reason to ever come out of the game. This already happens, but on a broader scale with a more powerful immersion element... we don't have the data for this uncharted territory. I believe this could spell the beginning of the end of humanity as we know it.

Still not convinced, consider that marriages have been formed and destroyed over World of Warcraft. Some people identify themselves by which games and consoles they own/play. I believe people are becoming more isolated from each other, not less, by technology. All this, combined with an increasingly bleak outlook for the future of the world economy--V.R. could very well be the next boom.

If this is the case, this is certain: falling birth rates, aging population, increasingly anti-social behavior among people, cultural decay and eventually, physical dystopia with virtual utopia.

I'm not even among the first to think this, it's a common theme in a great deal of science fiction, yet I think we are actually seeing the beginning of this event in human history before our eyes.

Think about it--people with no job, no girlfriend...for $300 you can escape this world completely and live a virtual life with virtual people. What difference does it make if its real or not? I must re-iterate, people already do this--so just imagine the same thing on an epidemic level.

 

To be honest I don't see "falling birth rates" as a problem.

While I expect that some of what you (and many before you) have described will happen, I'm not sure that it'll happen to people who aren't already receptive to spending their whole life in World of Warcraft or whatever. I don't think that a better visual display is going to suddenly suck productive people into being unproductive, which seems to me to be the real fear behind what you describe - that people will stop advancing.

 

Falling birth rates is nothing but good in a world battling over population.

Anyway no we won't end up like the matrix.

 

I think the level of immersion will have to get a lot deeper for us to start to lose large swaths of the population into cyberspace. As it is right now, cyber reality doesn't really replace physical reality, and a vast majority of people start to miss real world experiences if they become too wrapped up in the virtual space. Sure, it is common for people to go on weeks, or months long MMO binges, but at some point the novelty wears off and they say to themselves, "WTF am I doing? This is pointless, I want to go outside."

Now maybe once they figure out how to achieve full sensory immersion things might change for humanity, but we're probably still several decades away from that. Even at that, there will still be a portion of the population who prefer meat-space as well as billions in the 3rd world for whom that kind of tech will be far out of reach.

The Occulus Rift is a admirable step up in VR tech, but still far from the goal. I think there will be a temporary boom for them once the set is finally released to the public, but if it isn't followed by significant improvements, the novelty will wear off. It's a cool device, but not a game changer.

 

And that's the key of this issue, isn't it? There will always be a subset of people that will be completely addicted to something. Can games and technology increase this subset to a larger proportion, or do new, "addictive" things simply divert addicts from one kind of addiction to another?

I'm not sure there's any way to know for sure right now.

 

Wont be long before people have holographic suites in their home, totally lifelike.. you think there are going to be moral implications then? of course. it wont stop people tho.

 

OK people get addicted to alternate versions of reality already, parents have neglected their children, marriages and lives have been destroyed by individuals becoming addicted to virtual worlds already. Maybe the games industry wants or needs to set up a monitoring system that helps people with game addiction problems.

And just like there are treatment centres for other addictions there are centres for the treatment of video game addiction.

But if you think of the world as a whole then you will have to be living in a rich country to be able to afford the hardware (VR Headset $300, PC VR Capable $500, High Speed Internet Connection, Software) to enter VR. A big proportion of the planets population cannot afford VR.

On a global scale the number of people with online gaming/virtual world addiction are probably very small.

But you're basing your premise on the limited current input mechanics that we currently have, where we are seated and use a mouse and keyboard/gamepad/joystick input device.

What about VR input that maps your movement into the virtual world, then VR game players start to become top athletes, not couch potatoes.

Also in VR once you are immersed the clunky nature of current player input and character interaction really starts to be more jarring, we need VR that responds like the real world. So we need improved character interaction, voice recognition and character AI.

So the future of VR will be more social not less.

Think also that with modern language translation systems we could play games and have adventures with anyone around the world.

Now think that with VR you can go to your virtual workspace as soon as you can plug in. No more need for an hour long commute to an office cubicle, your office could be any virtual backdrop you want.

VR can allow people from diverse backgrounds to get together and play, learn, grow and solve problems.

Now think of the potential for remote controlled robots via VR and manual jobs can be completed with minimal risk and strain to the workers.

VR drone pizza delivery, VR robotic builders, VR robotic soldiers, VR robotic surgeons.

 

It's a screen you strap to your head, not The Matrix. It's not THAT compelling. Someone who is prone to addiction can get hooked on *something* no matter what. These kinds of fears are massively overblown in my opinion. Happens every time anything slightly new comes around.

I've already seen an article on the Oculus Rift from some game journalist that basically says "bored now." And the consumer version is even out yet! Once the novelty wears off, what's left will be a niche of players using the Rift for games that suit it especially well. I think that's going to be stuff like realistic racing sims and flight/space sims, and probably some new types of games, all of which may remain a pretty small part of the market. Though I do think it's going to be very cool in those specific cases. I've tried iRacing in VR, which is surprisingly great even with DK1. For mainstream gaming, I don't know.

 

Heck, birth contraceptive devices can be replaced with Oculus Rifts to prevent pregnancies! Pure genius!

 

People seem to have a very smallminded angle on this, although i'm never completely sure if smallminded hence slow uptake is a bad thing. I am however invested in showing as many people the technology (induced depth perception) as possible so I guess i'm very much 'pro vr' - This doesn't make OR the most typical vessel in which the mainstream will discover it, in fact I think VR in the current sense is just one of many converging technologies that will eventually create a whole much more interesting than Matrix and watnot, something that makes things like The Matrix seem very naive (Like technology usually does to its predictions)

Along with increasing speeds of mobile internet, developments in AR like Google Glass (Where VR and AR converge to place you, unquestionably, in a reality that is in truth as much of reality as you want it to be), employment practices where the majority of a days work be done on a computer be moved to workers placed in reclining positions and a virtual work environment reduce health issues and their cost to nothing while much increasing productivity (Don't have to move for a screenshare, infinite workspace, hugely customisable input surfaces), natural adoption of a bunch of mobile technologys like 3D scanning the surroundings (aggregate into Google owning the most complex and up to date 3D model of the entire planet, useful in AR/VR), and adoption of open platform independant graphics standards, like WebGL creating a move to webapps having much more relevance to reality than before and Microsoft's Office suite become antiquated quickly - these are just examples that jump quickly to mind, but yes it's the start of a path that ultimately results in an increased distance from our 'reality' and what we are and how we define it.

Our reality's just a combination of sensory input, its no more valid or true than anything we can pipe ourselves that comes from a computer in the sense of fully encompassing universal truth, and moving from that, realising that without purpose having realised ourselves to be simply experiencers of senses, what we define as reality move towards more efficient and meaningful implementation - Fantastical films still make possibly (In the case of pure sense, definitely) naive assumptions as to where humans will get in replacing senses, bodies and so on in the future, and if we end up as brains in a jar, it may not be to our cost, as being alive might mean emancipation from the purgatory of being an animal and onto whole new ways to experience totality as a race

The last bit was definitely getting a bit beyond what is easy to explain to people, but yes, as it stands it's simply something everyone should experience at least once, but it will have its part to play in some fundamental changes in the modern world in the future, all the players in which being part of the inevitable progression to points further than which this post itself makes sense. If you're really fond of physicality, btw, enjoy it while it lasts, i'm soaking it up while I can whilst taking this stuff to people in the happy knowledge I was part of the generation than straddled the divide (I remember what the 80s were like, blimey)

 

I've tried it. It wasn't very immersive. So no.

 

Ahh i've finally found an OR troll

 

I dunno, if I wear it for hours at a time it makes my head hurt. It's also terribly pixelated, I'm waiting to see how much of an improvement the 2nd version is.

I was working on an underwater project (lots of caustics) and cavern project and had to wear the thing while testing/developing/etc and for long periods of time and afterward I felt like I'd just stepped off a boat to solid ground.

 

I don't really think you can judge the VR experience by the OR devkit 1 experience, even the second devkit. Using Google Cardboard i've come to the conclusion that a decent 1080p screen would make a world of difference - HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S3 being screens I checked - and on top of that much better response times, no blur and ghosting, and the second devkit should provide something the first devkit was hinting at, and i've had extremely pleasing results just using a smartphone in a cardboard housing.

All that is neither here nor there however as I think on the subject, the work of Oculus in particuar is becoming irrelevant, many companies are putting a load of money into this, the form factor and convenience will make the original devkit seem extremely primitive in comparison and focusing on one brand rather than the medium (VR itself) being misguided like judging all speakers based on their first inception

As for not having 'too much', this will eventually be impossible while maintaining competitiveness in the workplace, there's already good incentives to introduce the technology to the workplace in an improved form and it seems an inevitable ingredient to the one day undoubtably pervasive part AR will play in our lives - one day this will be in front of everyones eyes, all the time, even if the form it takes at that time is well away from big headsets and more a natural extension of the research than the initial factor of inducing a core aspect of perception artificially, easily

 

I would agree that technology is having a detrimental effect on social capabilities. Whereas in the pre-2000s, if you insulted someone person-to-person, you had to live with the consequences (i.e. live taught you to cope with and work together with people having other views), these days you can just hit someone on a forum, chat or whatever and run, never facing the backlash.

And whatever brand of crazy you subscribe to, the internet makes sure you find other people who hold the same beliefs. Add a little bit of confirmation bias and you've got a nice group of anti-social, insult-shouting teenagers utterly convinced that the world is flat, the government works with space aliens, <insert favorite trope here> and that everyone who says different is stupid.

But I don't think VR will particularly worsen that. When you "tune in" to a game, you already loose sight of everything outside of your screen.

 

I recently wrote an EBook about this. It explores the idea that the Human race is evolving into Metaspace( Cyberspace) and that rather than being a brain in a jar as you suggest, that souls will incarnate straight into the worlds that have been created either now or later. If they exist then they are real, so VR can be seen as a stepping stone to the Human Race evolving beyond the Physical.

 

Ahh i was just using brains in a jar as simple layperson speak for no longer having a physical presence in the previously-understood-to-be-main-domain-in-which-we-manifest, it could be taken in all sorts of directions but I guess the most identifiable landmark for postanimal existence is via computation thanks to stuff like The Matrix, although as said I find that film a fun but naive approach of something that will without doubt transcend our understanding of dimensionality or computation, and it be reached through a big mix of all manner of technological innovation. It's an interesting thing to think about for sure, but something I couldn't write (kudos for your book!) about as i'd undermine the point of it, i felt, by discussing things that would be rendered naive maybe only decades from now.

The whole idea of spaceflight could be naive, when we realise our need for expansion can go 'sidewards' not outwards and technology bring the race for resources to a happy close, our bodies being very wasteful meatbags (Blender had it) by then and hence the process of existing functionally being much more efficient, nevermind how we exist as beings, maybe free of temporality in a sense of perception - with the lens of perception taken away from physicality and taught to navigate a much deeper well of possibility, things do start to make current attempts to understand them increasingly naive with a real sense of what it could entail kept for the true intellectual giants currently alive. I think the same wellspring that allows the great mathematicians and physicists to think as they do, is in fact a little link into post-human/animal perception. I think a few others get a taste from psychosis and chemistry but I don't think these result in such a constructive appreciation. I feel like i'll never get there myself (at least without psychosis or chemistry) but do wish it on.

God I do go on, but it's a very interesting subject, I wonder if there's some point at which the perceptual evolution of humankind becomes self-propogating and even the need to physically maintain something made irrelevant in the face of what comes on - does 'real time' do the cheesy slow motion to stop and we realise we have infinity in the blink of an eye? Infinity in infinity directions. Funny looking at those clunky headsets and seeing the first signs of human apotheosis taking root

 

It's not a new thing. VFX-1 was here before and failed because public wasn't interested in VR. Basically this can happen again. But with Morpheus from Sony I think VR has a chance.

 

I don't see VFX-1 as being synonymous really, particularly on the basis of 'public wasn't interested in VR'. It's not an intrinsic lack of interest, it was a lack of social media networking creating buzz around it, lack of easily accessible computing to run the thing at any agreeable resolution/framerate/latency needs/rendering quality and I suppose absolutely most fundamentally important that I should have checked and now have - VFX1 didn't do what the OR is famous for doing and hence makes any consideration of it silly. If it doesn't do depth perception then it's not doing the thing that has those who have used new VR tech so interested.

It's not a new thing though, the phenomena has been known, it's just only now it's been possible to get this stuff into the hands of the public so easily

 

No.

 

It's more the sign that the start of the end of humanity as we know it had started but probably started several thousand (tens of thousand?) years ago and games paraphernalia wont do anything remotely bad. Other, later products will do possibly bad possibly good things, depending on how you see it.

 

Think about it-- how can someone with no job afford something for $300?

If humanity hasn't falling with the advent of the gun, then it's not going anywhere soon!!

 

It's already happening in Japan.

But nothing can beat the real thing, the people inclined to this sort of thing probably weren't getting laid before this anyway.

 

Even w

The declining birth rate in Japan is motivated by a lot more factors than just videogames. Articles that place the blame on games fail to understand that one of the reasons these games are so popular is more in response to the conditions that have lead to a declining birth rate.

There's a lot of cultural factors in Japan that are playing into the declining birth rate that people like to ignore.

 

I heard Japan's declining birth rate is because of people working too hard to have relationships. Look at this.
http://theweek.com/article/index/254923/everything-you-need-to-know-about-japans-population-crisis

 

I just meant that birth decline is already happening in Japan, I'm not putting the full blame on games.

 

Sounds like a growth rate in accordance with the welbeing of humanity, hurrah those japanese and their early moves

Seriously though, there's no real reason to bunk this in with the 'has no life' userbase, i don't have a life although the rest is lovely, granted, but automatically seeing VR as a shrinking from the light kind of thing is really no more relevant than saying 'everyone who has gamed has gamed alone', not in the same spheres. I'll add that a bunch of folk who would happily claim a life now actively prefer the virtual existence and the virtual existence is getting a bunch of no lifers laid!

 

That's Ok man, it's good to see that someone else in the computer world is thinking about this stuff. It's actually important because grasping the big picture can give a brief glimpse of why the Cyber Movement is actually happening. There is no going back, if there was an Apocalypse then photo-voltaic cells may well become currency. People would be desperate to get back into their cyber worlds.. Such are the inroads that humanity have made into the non physical realms while still having a physical body.

 

The gun was the beginning of civilization and the end of the biggest and meanest doing what they wanted to the weaker. The 90 year old crippled granny could now take down the biggest marauding barbarian muscle heap by pointing and pulling a trigger. The great equalizer. Gun control is aiming and shooting properly. Anything else is simply a power grab for planned subjugation and control and possible genocide.

VR tech will expand out and be useful for things like long distance manipulated surgeries where the doctor in India can view the patient and operation he is performing through a servobot a continent away. The actual driver behind this will not be games..but... porno..falling birthrates anyone??

 

at the end of the day, the user is still gonna get up to eat. hes still gonna go chuck a piss and take a dump. so eventually the immersion will be broken and they will jump back to the real world. so nah, i dont think anything big is going to happen. us nerds that use it will still be a minority aha

 

I guess i'll wait until a better presented thread comes along to wax lyrical about VR and things, the important point being its place in AR, which is the case where you don't even take your excellently crafted google glass turbo editions off when you go for a pee, take a dump, in fact you'd prob get a bunch of groovy info on the overlay - amount of bogrolls left as you walk to the bathroom, some crazy app diagnosing your poop and so on. Like said vr will end up a complementary technology, it will worth with others, and help designers of augmented reality really integrate the unreal into the familiar, eventually seamlessly i hope

 

I doubt dedicated AR devices like Glass will ever take off, if not just because they make you look like a massive jackass in public, whereas VR just makes you look like a massive jackass in the privacy of your own home.

 

I can only disagree. Have you used one? When you've seen what it's all about and can translate that into further lifestyle integration you'll see it becomes compelling. Focussing on implementation is really not the way to look at it right now, but i'm absolutely certain the benefit of an always-on augmented reality HUD with depth perception tricks being played to seat the artificial content extremely naturally into the real world would be be far too compelling to resist.

Being able to see folks fb status and mood, deliberately made public to AR users? thats just asking for sex everywhere, filth all over the place, but in a more serious sense, user filterable information about their surroundings all the time, a gas company guy might use it to profile properties visually to see how takeup is in the area, the fanciful embellishment you can give reality itself, absolutely craploads of data available and filtering it, favouriting it and the mobile or whatevers doing the thinking doing simple learning algorithms to make the real word a feck load more exciting.

I could go on and on, but i'll stop. Use your imagination! You might possibly be 30+, the takeup of this stuff when looking swanky will be young people who from my visits around the city dont give a S*** how foolish they look

I don't see any compelling argument against technology that can unquestionably make the humdrum into something to be enjoyed, nevermind if you wanna push the boat out

 

Thanks for responding, I'm glad you came. I see a lot of arguments that mirror things I've considered, allow me to further the argument a little.

@pjde_: at the end of the day, the user is still gonna get up to eat. hes still gonna go chuck a piss and take a dump. so eventually the immersion will be broken and they will jump back to the real world. so nah, i dont think anything big is going to happen. us nerds that use it will still be a minority aha

This is the biggest argument against a matrix-lite world. However, it has the elements necessary to refute itself contained within its very argument. People eat, people use the bathroom. People consume and create messes. This is problematic from a total control standpoint. If people could consume less and produce less waste while remaining in one place, that would be optimal. We did it with chickens. Why not humans? After all, humans are just livestock. Games are increasingly being marketed to non-nerds as well. You may have heard of this trend. The pieces of the puzzle are there, ready to be assembled. There are reasons why VR-topia will happen.

@Daniel Talis : That's Ok man, it's good to see that someone else in the computer world is thinking about this stuff. It's actually important because grasping the big picture can give a brief glimpse of why the Cyber Movement is actually happening. There is no going back, if there was an Apocalypse then photo-voltaic cells may well become currency. People would be desperate to get back into their cyber worlds.. Such are the inroads that humanity have made into the non physical realms while still having a physical body.

Exactly. The only argument against this is to claim that things are getting better not worse and that the world economy is just going to turn around.

@lazygunn: I guess i'll wait until a better presented thread comes along to wax lyrical about VR and things...

"if we end up as brains in a jar, it may not be to our cost, as being alive might mean emancipation from the purgatory of being an animal and onto whole new ways to experience totality as a race"

So what happens when you get poetic?

@Kinos141 : Think about it-- how can someone with no job afford something for $300?

If humanity hasn't falling with the advent of the gun, then it's not going anywhere soon!!

If the government believes they can gain an advantage by handing people something to occupy their short attention spans, they will find a way. Humans aren't the suicide machines they're accused of being... humans are compulsive pleasure seekers and vicious when you try to control them by force. The only way to control humans is by trapping them in a compulsive cycle of behavior.

@ippdev: VR tech will expand out and be useful for things like long distance manipulated surgeries where the doctor in India can view the patient and operation he is performing through a servobot a continent away. The actual driver behind this will not be games..but... porno..falling birthrates anyone??

Virtual lives. Virtual relationships with other people through a virtual interface where you look like you want to look, sound how you want to sound and sex is free to be experienced without consequences. I didn't actually think the sky was falling until I saw the sales figures for Grand Theft Auto V. Yes. People are sick of reality and they want out. They want out bad.

You give people a way out that isn't illegal and that satisfies the whole array of human needs in a compulsive fashion and you'll have a lost generation and a vastly different future for humanity.

@Dabeh : It's already happening in Japan.

We look at Japan and laugh because we don't see how we could ever become like them. After all, Americans are manly. There's no way that we will ever become like Japan.

 

A lot of effort was put into making cigarettes fashionable. We've barely started the process of setting perceptions for VR or AR fashion. As the devices shrink the options open up.

 

It is critical to understand that this is not just about Oculus Rift, it is about similar technologies and a beginning of the end of an age of man. We conquered the natural world. It's done, you can view the maps. Hop on a plane and see it for yourself. We found solutions to problems that have plagued us since the beginning, survival rates for newborn children are miraculous. What we know about bacteria and viruses... we fear a global epidemic but we have measures to fight it. We're bored now, as a species. Machines do everything for us and it's only going to be more true in the future. There'll be no need for employment for most people.

We are looking at becoming a bunch of stargazers lazily dreaming about things. Sure, we complain about our "jobs" but compared to what humans endured in the past, our version of work is a joke. We're almost there now, with currently tech.

Imagine deeper immersion, not being able to see or hear the world around you... it may not appeal to you, reader, but to people in the future, it may be just as real to them as anything. Your parents never envisioned computers. Just remember that.

 

No offence about the thread btw, it's just i think a more constructive response could be gotten by approaching VR itself, outside any particular implementation. People get told amazing stories about vr and go WOW COOL and then its big headsets and EERRNERDYBERGERNER, even though they shortly afterwards get a go on that rollercoaster demo, become converts and say 'give it a few years'.

Worth reiterating over and over - VR is feck all about two screens in front of your eyes, its induction of depth perception via some neat optical tricks and subconscious behaviour, you really do need to try it before saying much about it as this also explains the weird fundamental shift in thinking you get when you know that's possible, and what other stimuli can be played with, but for now enjoying walking around a very convincing room you're in is pleasant while you sit in a different room occupying the same place, some games have already proven amazing experiences - Dear Esther was a pretty curio without, but with its quite something else

 

I can see a room full of people with VR headsets on exploring cyber worlds, or the same cyber world but if I was involved I would want the door to the room locked, the phone off the hook and a non participant watching over our physical bodies. That way I could allow myself to become fully immersed without fear of being shocked into returning.

 

Rule 100 of the evil overlord list:

"Finally, to keep my subjects permanently locked in a mindless trance, I will provide each of them with free unlimited Internet access."

 

Cigarettes are also powerfully addictive to literally everyone. The effort to make them fashionable was to get new customers and help influence legislation.

 

I take back what I said about needing to be rich to afford an Oculus Rift.

Although you do need some cardboard, lenses and a smartphone.

 

folk have already started to have at it with cardboard, including me. finally astar found a use.

 

I'll go ahead and take the way this topic went as a "yes".

 

In the long term, yes, but it takes quite some time for the physical addiction to set in.

I couldn't find the exact figures, but here's quotes from an article based on the one I read which was in a book called Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell:

To be clear, this is only a small part of what the book covered, and from memory a part of the smoking essay pointed out that some people do indeed get addicted very quickly. But for most people it takes time, and the whole fashionable/cool push marketing cigarettes is about keeping people using them casually and/or socially for as long as possible to increase the chances of addiction.

I don't think that the concept of genuine physical addition is overly relevant to the VR discussion, but I do still think the fashion/coolness applies. Chances are that a significant portion of VR usage will be somehow social (Facebook seem to think so too...), so getting a critical mass of adopters is going to be important - who's going to use a social platform that their friends aren't on? And for social stuff that probably means winning over the extroverted fashionable people rather than the introverted practical ones. After all, any extroverted fashionable person you win over will help you sell it, where the introverted practical people will just do their own thing.

 

It won't be instantaneous universal adoption. When video games first came out, nobody cared. It was years before they had any kind of popular appeal and it was clever marketing and novelty that helped them gain mass consumption. That wasn't enough to prevent a near crash of the industry in the early 80's though. Persistence on behalf of the market and a generation growing up with video games helped to create a culture that consumes a ridiculous amount of video games.

Cigarettes contain nicotine, you become chemically dependent if you smoke for any length of time and this causes what is known as addiction.

Video games, on the other hand, lack the chemical link. It's not an addiction. It's behavioral compulsion. Comparing the two is misleading. Compulsions are much worse because they can affect people who haven't technically done anything immoral or unethical. They're also a lot easier to keep secret. What you end up with is something that can be extremely
hard to stop thinking about/acting upon that is simultaneously rather benign in terms of modern standards.

Two other compulsive behaviors to consider: pornography use and gambling.

I believe video game play is almost as compulsive a behavior as gambling or pornography use. It just takes the right game at the right time and the right subculture of people to get VR into 2-3% of households. Then it's all over.

 

All over for who?

 

Not who, but what.

All over for the current status quo of the little worker bees going to work, starting families and making the rich richer while the poor get poorer with perpetual war as a backdrop.

 

If you haven't already.... read this:
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2048299,00.html

This article really grabs you. It is hard to stop reading it cause it's so interesting. This is the end of humanity as we know it. Unfortunate.

 

Unless a device will have sex with you and feed you (in that order) then no there is no device on the planet that would result in the end of humanity. - also oculus is just a stepping stone to augmented reality, where the real fun is.​