Well in the author's opinion it's actually not the same. That's why he specifically points out counter examples of non-VR experiences which have similar but notably less intense effects.
It's still an opinion, sure, but the author did address this comparison.
It’s not the same. Seeing your friend or family member trapped in a small box is very different from having out with a low fidelity version of them playing mini golf or ping pong. Immersion and presence are things that you won’t understand if you refuse to try VR for longer than 5 minutes.
> When I got my Vive and was playing around in The Lab, and one of the experiences puts you on the side of a mountain, I stepped off a cliff edge and I could feel my heart rate increase slightly as my brain was expecting me to fall to my death. The immersion is real.
Not disputing anything you're saying but I actually have this same experience playing games where you can fall and the player accelerates (particularly if the camera is first person or right behind the player). Just looking at the screen when I jump off a cliff in something like WoW makes my stomach feel like 20lbs of iron while I'm falling. I've kinda learned to enjoy it at this point.
To be fair, a video of a VR event is way different than being in VR for that event. A comparison is a video of people watching a movie versus actually watching that movie, except more extreme. VR is far more visceral, at least when done well. A video review of, say Half-Life Alyx, is no comparison to actually being in it.
Now, that said, Meta's seems to be floundering a lot for its actual art style, there is no doubt about that!
Yes, it’s a completely different experience. Cardboard isn’t really enough to trick your brain into feeling like you’re in a physical space, it’s more like a proof of concept of the idea of VR
This is true, but there is still a significant difference. You have to actively engage your eyes to have that immersion. This is also the case when you can explore and look around a VR environment. There is a difference in agency. Naievely use the conventions of film in VR, however, and you can lose that. Everyone wants to be able to peer into another's POV. No one wants to be strapped into it. Doing VR wrong can change VR from the former to the latter.
Something I should have probably addressed in the article but didn't get to it for brevity: there are at least two kinds of immersion, and people tend to conflate them. (I'm not immune to this.)
There's intellectual immersion. Flow. You can be intellectually immersed reading a book or playing chess.
Then there's sensory immersion. Put a VR on, you're immersed this way.
> You can never feel like you are somewhere else - or something immaterial is with you - until a full sensory experience coalesces, even if it's "low resolution."
I'm not sure I agree with that. Games like Beat Saber and the old demo of Budget Cuts have really made me feel like I'm inside another world, particularly when I was newer to VR.
I say "not sure" because we're not necessarily talking about the same thing—the above are "games" or at least "experiences", not "interfaces. You don't really touch anything in Beat Saber, except for the blocks where a strong rumble is sufficient. Harder to do that in a UI.
What I was trying to communicate in my original post was that VR is not like those mediums on this specific point. It completely removes you from the environment, it provides a lot more immersion but then also takes a lot more commitment to dive into. It only takes me 30 seconds to get the headset on and be in a game, so that's not the issue, it's just an entirely different level of engagement. I almost feel a little guilty when I use VR, because it feels like I'm forgoing the real world. I don't feel that way about games or movies.
How are they in any way related? Nintendo's experience isn't designed for VR and that fact means they don't have nearly the same design considerations. It's a completely silly comparison.
Yep, that's it, I fully agree with you. I was trying to relay that the exhaustion i get from the VR is just inherent to the physical activities I perform while in VR, nothing to do with VR itself. You phrased it much better than I did, so thanks for clarifying to others reading :)
Exactly. These are the symptoms of a withdrawal from escapism. You could replace "VR" in the article by many other kinds of absorbing experiences.
Not to discredit the author's own personal findings, it's probably a healthy thing to be self-aware of these feelings. And there might be something to VR that makes the contrast of detachment more intense.
I'm still developing these thoughts, but I think the critical difference lays in the difference between "VR experience of Hiroshima bombing" and "watching Schindler's List."
A movie is a narrative. Otherwise it wouldn't be entertaining and nobody would watch it. Even documentaries have narratives. Narratives require good guys, bad guys, etc.
A VR "experience" is just that - one little slice of experience. I really don't think that can be biased (maybe, depending on the experience). It's just "putting yourself in someone's shoes." I don't see how anybody could be biased about how terrible a city being nuked was. It was terrible. Someone might argue that "it was for the greater good," but it was still terrible. Maybe it'll make it harder for a future (now child) president to make the decision to drop the bomb, good! Is that a biased viewpoint, to not want suffering of anybody? I guess maybe it is.
It's funny to read this headline as a general statement. I work for Strivr (https://www.strivr.com/), and we make immersive training. And the same forces that make immersive games more enthralling make immersive trainings significantly more powerful as learning experiences.
So I don't know, there's definitely such a thing as immersive experiences that are harmful, but I think for educational purposes more immersive experiences are strictly better than less immersive ones. (Provided that you want to learn as fast as possible and you want to focus on learning.) Now, immersive experiences are also more expensive (especially to get right) than less immersive ones, so cost is a factor but I think we definitely want more immersive education.
I've read many online claims from people who have said this about their first time in VR. Some even say the effect even carried over with them into the real world after leaving VR. You should give it a whirl!
> It sounds awesome to think about being in VR and being in the FPS
Yes. This is one of the things that leads to the counterintuitive truth that if you want a fully immersive and fun game (defining "immersive" as "the player is no longer aware that the game world is not their actual reality), you don't actually want too much realism.
What you want is an "effortlessness" -- the ability for the player to trigger an action without effort or conscious thought.
Well, it's based on some totally arbitrary assumptions, such as that people in VR wouldn't typically be aware that they are in VR.
This is certainly not the case nor the intention with video games (from which the whole argument is extrapolated), no matter how realistic they can get
It's still an opinion, sure, but the author did address this comparison.
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