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When was the first time you heard of virtual reality? It might have been only recently, with Mark Zuckerberg’s extolling of the metaverse, or maybe it was back in 2012 with the launch of the Oculus Rift, one of the first commercially available and affordable headsets. It might even have been thirty years ago when virtual reality (VR) burst into the arcade scene of the 1990’s. Over the last two decades, VR and its sister technology, augmented reality (AR), have become ever more popular and ubiquitous throughout society. With each new wave of hype VR and AR are hailed as game changers, society altering, and the future of the internet. Amongst all of this, it is tricky to see where the future of VR actually lies. But fear not, in this article I will attempt to uncover the areas where VR has made genuine inroads, where it may make advances next, and the potential dark side of this technology.
But first, to see where VR might be headed, we must explore how far VR has come in the 70 years since it emerged. To prevent confusion, VR here refers to technology that immerses the user in a virtual world via a headset, whereas AR is when this virtual world is superimposed over the real one. The first VR headset was created in 1968 by Ivan Sutherland and his student, Bob Sproull. Christened fabulously as The Sword of Damocles, it was only able to display wireframe shapes, superimposed over the real world. At the time this was revolutionary, as the user’s movements were picked up by the computer, allowing the user to “walk around” these boxes.
Fast forward to the 1990s and VR entered a bit of a boom-time, with the first VR video games and headsets being launched to consumers. These allowed for much higher levels of interactivity and body tracking than was previously possible. However, their availability was confined to arcade setups or the exceedingly wealthy. This is the key difference between today’s VR boom and that of the 1990s: in 2023, it is not unusual to own a VR headset. Although not exactly ubiquitous, the prevalence of the technology in households is far greater than it could ever have been in the 1990s. This is mainly down to cheaper hardware, greater processing power, and a greater range of uses for VR. The graphical advances since the 1990s make VR simply a nicer place to be, and, although still pricey, the cost of a headset and a gaming computer is not out of reach to the average enthusiast.
Despite more widespread adoption of VR technology, it is difficult to say whether it will continue to grow outside of its enthusiastic niche of users and become as omnipresent as, say, smartphones or laptops. The fact is, many people already feel that they spend too much time online and actively seek out pastimes that do not involve staring at screens. Despite this, there are some people determined to transfer all of our computing time into a virtual world and move our screens even closer to our faces.
…To read the full article, head over to Issue 31: Science in the 22nd Century
Written by Emily Oliver (she/they), a biotechnology graduate of the University of Edinburgh and ex-co-host of EUSci’s Not Another Science Podcast.