Virtual Reality Revisited (part 2): What it used to be

This week is a follow-up to what started last week – a (for me at least) rather in-depth reconsideration of what virtual reality means in a Web 2.0/social networking Internet.

Last week I tried to provide an overview of how I wanted this series of posts to go. This week, I want to take a bit of time and talk about what virtual reality used to be. Or, more accurately, what people used to think virtual reality would be when it arrived.

There’s a popular conception of VR.

I personally like Michael Heim’s definition of this popular one:

What is virtual reality? A simple enough question.

We might anwer: “Here, try this arcade game. It’s from the Virtuality series created by Jonathan Waldern. Just put on the helmet and the datagloves, grab the control stick, and enter a world of computer animation. You turn your head and you see a three-dimensional, 360-degree, color landscape. The other players see you appear as an animated character. And lurking around somewhere will be the other animated warriors who will hunt you down. Aim, press the button, and destroy them before they destroy you. Give it a few minutes and you’ll get a feel for the game, how to move about, how to be part of a virtual world. That’s virtual reality!”

That’s probably the image that most people think of when they hear the term.

This concept of VR has been the focus of how many different movies/books/graphic novels/etc. in the past several years. It seemed to be especially popular back in the 80s and 90s. Take, for example, the film adaptation of Stephen King’s Lawnmower Man.

But there’s a more academic one too

This is probably a glamorized, Star Trek’ed version of VR. Unfortunately, it’s a highly limited view of what VR is and can be. Rather than a digital recreation of the physical world where we all have super powers, there’s usually a much broader definition of the term.

Again here, I’m going to pull from Heim’s The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, but these are ideas that seem to be pretty universal in academic definitions of VR. See, for instance, Jonathan Steuer’s “Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining Telepresence” or “A Conceptual Virtual Reality Model” by Latta and Oberg. There’s a few bullet points that make up the more abstract definition of VR:

• Simulation: re-creating sensory experiences similar to “normal” reality
• Interaction: an “electronic representation with which [people] can interact”
• Artificiality: that is, not-quite-real
• Immersion: “sensory immersion in a virtual environment”
• Telepresence: being present in a place other than where your physical body resides

What I notice (and what you might) is that the Lawnmower Man version of VR fully works in this breakdown of VR’s components. It’s just one variant of the idea.

But another thing I notice that may not come out fully in this overly simplified definition is a separation between virtual reality and “normal” reality. Ideas like artificiality, immersion, and telepresence all involve a person moving her existence from one reality and placing it in another. The Matrix’s, well, matrix is probably the stereotypical example of this. When humans would “jack on” they would enter the matrix and be completely oblivious to the “real world” (Matrix geeks out there – is the term “jacking on” from this movie?).

Literature as VR

I find it interesting that the concept of VR can be traced back long before computers and silicon overtook the world. Though it wasn’t referred to in this term. I’m thinking here of the great works of fiction produced throughout the ages. And the pulp fiction. People, when reading about Ishmael, Huck Finn, Ali Baba’s 40 thieves, would escape into a reality that was not the real one. How many of us as children got lost in a book? Missed our stop on the bus ride home from school because we were engrossed in the story? Got in trouble for being up at 2am on a school night trying to finish that last chapter? This mental process seems to directly mirror the process involved in more contemporary notions of VR.

Simulation: Any good book will vividly duplicate the sensory experiences of the real world. My 10 year old niece is learning to write fiction stories right now – and she is constantly told to let the reader experience the event through sight, smell, sound, and such. Isn’t she being told to have her story simulate what the reader would experience in “normal” reality?

Interaction: Ok, I think this is the only one of the bullet point definitions that literature can’t match. When you get lost in a story, you’re trapped in the plot and characters that the author has created. There’s no significant way to influence how the end will come out or whether Edward runs away with Bella at the end.

But we do come up with ways to interact, don’t we? I remember creating “virtual” characters for the novels I read and inserting them into the plot. And “fan fiction” of popular media is a way to interact with the story line.

Now, there’s always the choose-your-own-adventure books that let you partially direct the plot, but they weren’t overtly popular.

Artificiality: And aren’t the realities of fiction really similar to our reality, with just a slight twist? Perhaps the people have superpowers or magical abilities. Or they are faced with a sentient whale. Or are placed in situations that seem feasible if unlikely. Or, well…

Immersion: This, of course, is the process of “losing” oneself in a book. Something that’s quite common, no?

Telepresence: Or placing yourself in a reality that is different from where your physical body resides. When a book is really good, don’t we find ourselves lost in its story, its reality?

Wrapping up

Where I want to leave off this week is here, where a concept of virtual reality used to reside. It’s not necessarily a Lawnmower Man or Matrix – like realm as Hollywood gives us. But rather, it’s a different world where we teleport ourselves for a time to live a different life.

Where I think this idea gets interesting is when we look at how virtual reality as a concept has evolved in the past couple years. No longer is it a world completely separate from our own. Instead, it’s one that is intimately and thoroughly intertwined with our “normal” one.

Next week I’ll start to explore that intertwining.

The Metaphorical Intersection of Science & Literature

Ok, I did that philosophically bad thing again and headed to Buffalo Wild Wings with my friend. Bad in that it always turns into several hours worth of rather exhausting philosophical/rhetorical discussions. Good, though, in that I always seem to get a blog post out of it.

The other night we ended up spending a lot of time on his subject of choice – mathematics as a metaphor. And it struck me that this could be a solution to an idea I’ve been grappling with for a little while. That is, the overlap that often exists between science and literature (or, more exactly, between scientists and literary authors). You see, I’ve always been intrigued (and routinely perplexed) by how often you’ll read of prominent scientists with a strong affinity for poetry or classic literature.

And my friend’s comments on the means by which math (and, indeed, science) is a metaphor for understanding the natural world seems to me to be a possible solution to that. So, while he can do far more justice to this argument than I can, I’d like to give the math-metaphor thing a shot. The argument is that math exists as a bridge between the purely abstract and the physical world. There is the abstract, that is the ability to propose a number of possible mathematical systems that all operate within their various ground rules. And we then apply those ground rules to the world that we see. Each mathematical system operates with its own accuracy – they are able to accurately represent the world in varying degrees. Think pre/post-relativity as a great example here. Both Newtonian physics (pre-Einstein) and relativistic physics (Einstein) are simply sets of abstract mathematical equations. They gain their weight from their ability to accurately model the world we see around us. If you’ve followed some of the recent theorizing about the multiverse, you’ll have noticed that there’s a number of mathematical sets out there that represent a number of possible multiverses, from 11 dimensions to 12, cyclical views of time, and “bubbles” of universes emanating from a multiverse big bang.

Now, what all these have to do with metaphors come from the way we apply these abstract mathematical ideas. My friend’s contention is that we are using these math ideas as metaphors when we apply them to explain the world we see. a²=b²+c² and E=mc² are all just a bunch of mathematical proofs that bear a correlation for what we see around us. They’re metaphors.

So, what struck me is the connection between what scientists do and what literary scholars do. Both use metaphors to explain the world around us. Sure, scientists try to explain the natural world and literary scholars try to explain the human condition, but the general mindset is largely the same. (If you’re wondering how literary scholars use metaphors, just ask yourself – did Huck Finn accurately represent the tear between white and black cultures, or did Dante actually mean to describe the makeup of Hell?) And this recognition that both scientists and literary scholars use metaphors answered a much less fundamental question of why so many scientists were amateur literary scholars.

I was always fascinated when reading biographies of historical scientists, how often they would read and study literature feverishly. Aristotle is an obvious place to start. True, he was a Greek, so he dabbled in everything. But Aristotle laid the foundation for much of the scientific process. And he’s still a major player in literary circles. Newton was an extremely well read theologian. Einstein could most definitely hold his own at a cocktail party for the English Department at the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Darwin, he was highly schooled in Christian literature and philosophy. More recently, Brian Cox (personally, my favorite modern Physicist) got his start in a rock band, a variant of literature. The number of scientists who read and/or write poetry is really quite massive.

So, my reasoning is that scientists so often develop a fascination with the literary world because of an implicit connection they see between its use of metaphors and their use in the sciences. Now, I don’t think that many scientists think in quite that manner, but there’s perhaps a Freudian connection going on there.

Religion & Philosophy

And this got me thinking about the overlaps between science, literature, religion, and philosophy. Placing major thinkers into these categories is a really tricky business, as they bounce so quickly from one to the other. Even religion and science, despite the modern divide that exists between them, have a deeply intimate past historically. Gregor Mendel, if you recall, developed the concept of genes that is a cornerstone of modern evolutionary theory.

So, the line of reasoning goes that if science and literature are connected through metaphors, can the connections between science, literature, religion, and philosophy be explained in the same way? I think maybe so. Religion often operates in metaphors. David slaying Goliath is not meant to be taken literally. Neither are the ubiquitous quotes from Confucius, the dances of American Indians, or the infighting amongst Ancient Greek gods. Philosophy, I think it can be argued, operates much like Mathematics when it comes to metaphors. The various philosophical traditions that dominate Western thinking (I can’t speak with much expertise for Eastern) act much like mathematical sets. Empiricism, rationalism, and existentialism are all just philosophical “sets of equations” that help to explain the world around us – in this case usually human to human interaction.

Big Picture Thinking

So, going really big picture here, maybe the human mind has developed in a way in that it understands the outside world purely through metaphors? I know we like to think that we directly observe and interpret the world we see, but do we? Maybe that’s why we so easily slip into the “virtual reality” of the Internet. We’re simply swapping one particular metaphor of reality for another? Same with getting lost in a good book – it’s a metaphor for an existence that we can easily apply.

I’m not sure about all this. It’s based on a loose association between a scientist’s profession and leisure activities. But it is an interesting train of thought – er, metaphor – for explaining human inquiry into the surrounding world. I guess I need to go hit the psychology journals to see what’s been done on metaphors recently.