VR Is Not Dead

Summary

As news of Meta shutting down Horizon Worlds, its virtual reality social platform, started to spread, commentators rushed to declare VR technology dead. They are wrong. Five years ago, the future looked promising for VR technology. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in October 2021 that the company would change its name to Meta and focus on building the metaverse, a global social virtual reality: “Our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.” Meta reportedly poured close to $20 billion a year into VR research with very little return. These resources will likely now be redirected towards AI development. While Meta definitely led the way in VR R&D efforts, it was not the only major tech company investing heavily in the technology during the 2010s and early 2020s. Microsoft, Google, and Sony, among others, spent billions on VR projects that mostly failed to meet industry expectations. AI is now the main focus of the tech industry, and it appears to be bigger than VR ever was. However, the final chapter on VR technology is yet to be written. The VR idea is deeply rooted in human psychology, philosophy, and culture; efforts to bring it to life with technology will persist. The key psychological element of VR is immersion. It is a cognitive state achieved when a user’s awareness of his or her physical self, surroundings, circumstances, and sense of time is diminished or lost by being surrounded in an engrossing total experience. The user is deeply engaged, involved; his or her natural disbelief is suspended; he or she is present in the simulated environment and situation. This state shares many cognitive characteristics with dreaming while sleeping. When sleeping, the body enters a state of suppressed senses and lowered engagement with the physical environment; the unconscious mind provides stimulus, and we dream. D...