
Virtual embodiment challenges our understanding of who and what we are - walterbell
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/02/are-we-already-living-in-virtual-reality/amp
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mattbierner
I've been exploring some similar ideas recently but focusing more on altering
your experience of the real world rather than VR [0]. Interesting to read
about the research being done on the subject

Even using very crude hardware, it is difficult to convey how profound I have
found some of my experiences. Take a simple setup that lets you see yourself
in the third person for instance. Logically you know that the person standing
there is you. You can reach out and feel the world about you, walk about and
feel yourself bump into walls. And yet there's also a disconnect. Almost a
numbing. I find that my mind often switches between feeling that I am in my
head and feeling that I am behind the camera. And this leads to a feeling that
I are nowhere. That this is not reality.

Take off the headset, and now reality itself feels broken. Your perspective
and sense of your body indescribably off. Sometimes the effect lasts just a
few seconds, other times it lasts the entire rest of the day

As silly as they are, my experiments with VR headsets and cameras have
genuinely changed my understanding of myself and of the world. I don't
understand why people are not more excited / freaked out about the
possibilities this technology offers. Maybe it doesn't effect everyone in the
same way

Anyways, if nothing else, the article gave me a few new ideas for areas to
explore

[0]:
[https://blog.mattbierner.com/series/modded_reality/](https://blog.mattbierner.com/series/modded_reality/)
(just as heads up: a few posts are nsfw and most are way too long)

~~~
lev99
> freaked out about the possibilities this technology offers.

I've owned a Rift DK1, Rift DK2, Gear VR, and Vive. I am a VR enthusiast. As
profound as the experiences with VR are, after 500 hrs in each generation of
headset I find myself bumping up with the hardware and network limitations.
I'll apply for the first company to offer digital office space, and I'll sell
my monitors once I can read bash for 3 hours straight as comfortably in VR as
I can in flatland. We are just a long ways away on a lot of different
technological boundaries. I'm not freaking out because it doesn't feel like we
are almost there. It feels like we need a new wireless communication protocol,
improved battery weight, better displays, more powerful GPUs, better software
UX, better inputs, etc. etc.

> Take off the headset, and now reality itself feels broken. Your perspective
> and sense of your body indescribably off. Sometimes the effect lasts just a
> few seconds, other times it lasts the entire rest of the day

For me the only "broken reality" aspect of popping in and out is if my digital
of physical body isn't where I expect it. The feeling never lasts more than 3
seconds, and it's more jarring than anything. I wonder if it's an age thing.
My first HMD was a Virtual Boy when I was still very young.

~~~
mattbierner
Yes, I’m not fully sold on VR yet either. Perhaps the problem is most VR
experiences more or less try to convince you that your real body is in a
virtual world, and this leads to an uncanny sensory valley with today’s tech:
the tracking is never quite right, the resolution never high enough, and some
NPC will alway manage to break your immersion.

So instead of VR, I’ve focused on exploring alternate experiences of reality.
And these experiences somehow never feel broken, even when they clearly are.
Last fall for example, I brought a pair of oversized eyeballs that wirelessly
stream video to a headset to a maker faire. The eyeballs worked great in my
apartment but wireless difficulties on site caused latency spikes of over 1
second. Imagine: a full second between you moving one of the eyeballs and your
view updating. Horrible. That would never fly for VR but people seemed to love
this setup even with the delay. In a way, the delay became part of the new
reality that the device presented.

And this is what excites me: the possibility of exploring new realities,
realities beyond normal human experience. Not just fantasy worlds, but
entirely new ways of being and sensing and understanding (the example I keep
returning to is synesthesia). Truly being able to realize that vision is a
long way out but current tech let’s us get the slightest of glimpses at what
this future could hold. And this is what scares me: that the new realities we
create will be reflections of us as we are today

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evo_9
I find articles on New Yorker to be over-written to the point of distraction.

I ran this story through Hemingway-App to get some stats:

"77 adverbs. Aim for 26 or fewer.

37 uses of passive voice, meeting the goal of 88 or fewer.

8 phrases have simpler alternatives.

52 of 439 sentences are hard to read.

70 of 439 sentences are very hard to read."

~~~
lainga
This has been a bone of contention since the Gilded Age, when the problem was
that New Yorker writers tended to write "Germanically", the verb of every run-
on sentence always at the end putting.

~~~
igorkraw
Anecdata: I found your joke sentence more pleasant in the "cognitive ease"
way. I am Germanophone.^ ^

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diamondo25
> In the V.R. game Surgeon Simulator, players use power drills, bone saws, and
> other tools to vivisect a humanoid alien that writhes in pain on the
> operating table.

Pardon? This is totally not true. Did the author even see the game? I stopped
reading after this.

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dEnigma
_You are viewing article 0 of 4 free articles this month._

Does this mean that they for some reason start counting at zero, or is this
article freely available? I really don't get it.

edit: After a reload it now says:

 _You are viewing article 1 of 4 free articles this month._

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ambrosite
Strangely enough, this tactic has made me much less inclined to click links
for the New York Times, the Washington Post, or any other online publication
that uses paywalls. I think, "Hmm, I only have 3 free articles left this
month, I don't want to waste one of them on this particular article" and
therefore I end up never reading any articles at all.

~~~
incompatible
I assume they keep track of it using cookies, so it's easily avoided.

~~~
rapnie
the NYT uses cookies, but the WaPo uses some other means.

i also avoid clicking these links, even if i know i probably won't reach
paywall limit that month.. its psychological :)

i like the Guardian model better, no paywall. now considering a paid
subscription out of sheer appreciation for that

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otakucode
>"And a character on a 2-D screen is completely different from one that’s your
height and looks you in the eye."

I've been waiting for this. I expect claims like this to fuel anti-VR hysteria
if it catches on in a significant way, especially if adolescents seem to like
it. It's a poorly thought out intuitive 'understanding' that has nothing of
substance behind it. If you want to compare VR to something, compare it to
acting in a play.

Consider the experience of acting in a play, say one with a violent scene. You
experience it bodily. With full fidelity and total realism. Your victim is a
living, breathing human being who has a family, hopes, dreams, can feel pain,
etc. And yet you raise the pistol, one which retorts loud enough to give your
ear-drums a good hit but which you know is loaded with a blank, and you fire.
You see the victim recoil in 'pain', with them exerting every effort to make
it look as real as possible, and a squib explodes, causing 'blood' to fly. You
have to be totally immersed in the situation and believe it entirely to be
able to sell the scene to the audience.

Literally the only thing that differs, from the point of view of the person
firing the gun, is that they know its not real. There are no other glaring
indications. It's just knowledge that its not real, the memory of the context
of walking onto a stage, etc. Now... can anyone explain why the experience
wearing a VR helmet, even postulating 100% accurate visual reproduction, will
somehow cause negative consequences that acting in a play never has?

Most who speak of the consequences of media do little more than rapidly
display their own willingness (or inability) to ignore the difference between
reality and fiction.

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yters
What if everything is just a dream? Can't prove it isn't!

OBEs are pretty interesting. Some are obviously hallucinations, people prove
it is not the real thing by shuffling a deck of cards when in body, and then
checking the deck when OBE. If the cards in the two experiences don't match,
the OBE is not real.

On the other hand, there are stories of hospital OBEs where patients actually
learn confirmable information about the real world that they had no way of
knowing if they did not really have an OBE. One example I've heard a couple
times is a lady who saw a green tennis shoe on the roof of the hospital, and
someone later went up and found it.

It is also interesting to learn the underpinnings of the Frankfurt school. I
had thought they were communists of some sort, but communists are just as
materialistic as the fascists they dislike. So, I guess they are a bit more
nuanced in their views.

~~~
incompatible
"Stories of hospital OBEs" ins't reliable information, it's urban legend. If
it was possible to obtain real information from OBE, it would be easy to
demonstrate it in a lab. You'd need somebody who can experience OBE at will.

~~~
yters
Why would it need to be easy to demonstrate in a lab to be true?

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olleromam91
I have to ask...

why would my ancestors choose to let the virtual reality that is projected
onto my self model, be one that shows another entity that looks very much how
I think i look like plus a slightly different accent, avidly explaining that
my reality is just a projection...?

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lincolnpark
We even created a training method around this for treating chronic pain.
([http://karunavr.com](http://karunavr.com))

