Virtual Reality Is Not the Wii

When my uncle finally got his hands on the newly released Nintendo Wii, everyone in the family was excited to try it. We picked a day and gathered in his living room. My cousins, uncles, aunts, and even grandparents were present, eager to see for themselves whether this new motion-tracking technology lived up to the hype.

It certainly seemed like it at first. We took turns with the Wii remotes, battling each other Wii Sports. It felt so satisfying to swing your arm and feel the vibration in the controller, as on the TV screen your racket struck a tennis ball, or your boxing glove stuck Grandpa’s face. When my turn with the remote was up, I grudgingly handed it off and immediately began looking for another opportunity to rotate in. The grandparents remarked intermittently at how far technology had come since they played basketball in the street with a trash can as a hoop. Everyone was having a good time.

But before an hour was up, you could sense a change in the atmosphere of the room. My relatives became more willing to cede the controller after a game and less insistent on getting it back. Side conversations spread as attention shifted from the screen. People left for the kitchen to get snacks and didn’t return. The wind was slowly leaving the sails of the celebration.

At the end of the day, the Wii was sealed in its cabinet. It was never again the main object of interest at a family meetup. Even when my cousin and I got together to play video games, we favored the Xbox and the PlayStation. They were just better consoles.

The novelty of the Wii wore off fast, and maybe that was part of the reason I became such a pessimist about trends in technology. The noise about blockchain, the internet of things, and data analytics never really registered with me. They were all just gimmicks, I figured, exciting for a while but ultimately lacking in impact.

So you can imagine my skepticism in the summer of 2017, when a team lead at the company where I was interning invited me to try virtual reality at his house. I agreed because you have to agree to such things, but I harbored no hope that I would actually enjoy playing video games with a VR mask—an experience I assumed you could simulate by playing Wii Sports with your face a couple inches from the TV screen.

But boy, was I in for a surprise. 

Waiting Game

It seemed like the team lead had invited everyone in the department to his VR night. When I got there, I found myself at the back of a long line for a shark attack simulator. When a person got to the front of the line, he would put on the VR mask and enter the scenario, while a huge TV screen showed everyone else what he was seeing.

I tried to pass the time with small talk, but when that got boring I resigned myself to watching the shark attack over and over again. It always happened the same way.

The player, who was technically a diver tasked with exploring an oceanic trench, would be lowered through the water in a metal cage. First he would pass by a variety of marine life. Then he would sink through a rocky tunnel that opened near the ocean floor. Next, a shark would circle him, drawing close and retreating, but becoming increasingly aggressive in its approaches. Finally, the team on the surface would pull the cage up to escape the shark, and the player would make it back to the tunnel just in time.

Two things struck me as I watched the scenario on loop.

First, the story could have been shortened considerably. Why did the player have to pass three kinds of fish on the way down, and why did the shark have to circle the cage a million times? It felt like the experience was taking twenty minutes per person, and the line was at a total standstill.

Second, the reactions from my coworkers as the shark got close seemed disproportionate. Even burly men squealed and jumped backwards, knocking into onlookers waiting their turn. I decided to be the first person who would stand as still as a statue throughout the ordeal.

When my turn finally came, they handed me the headset and a PlayStation controller. I pulled the mask over my eyes.

And right away, it was disorienting.

A Journey of Zero Miles

I was in a dim underwater chamber, surrounded by ornate pillars and bronze statues. I could see my controller hovering in front of me, right where I was holding it. It gave off a ghostly blue glow. When I moved the physical controller or turned its joysticks, the ghost controller reacted identically. I reached it forward to poke an air bubble in front of me, and the bubble rippled like it was real.

“Whoa,” I said.

But I barely heard myself, because there were headphones sealed over my ears. The noise of the party had been replaced with the soft churning you hear underwater. The man behind me sounded far away as he told me what button to push to start the experience. This was just the loading screen.

I pushed the button, and what I saw next made it obvious that I had been wrong about VR. There was no gradual realization, no lingering doubt, just an immediate, frank admission to myself that I had been way off-base.

Because I was literally in the ocean. I bought the illusion instantly. From the coral to the fish to the surface shimmering up above, it looked exactly like the real thing. And you could sense the vastness of it. The water went on for miles, beyond the diving cage, beyond the little reef around me, and way beyond the confines of any spare room made VR studio.

Somehow, there was a level of visual realism that far exceeded computer screens and televisions. Later I would decide that what sets VR apart is not high-resolution graphics or even the way the pixels span your entire field of view. Instead, it’s the way it shows each of your eyes slightly different angles of the same scene, making the environment feel three-dimensional.

The effect was so striking that even the metal bars of my cage fascinated me. I spent the first several moments pawing the space where they should have been, marveling that my hand was passing through. Conversely, there was a part of my cage that should have been empty, where the physical world hid the angular corner of a couch. I must have bumped into that couch a dozen times, and every time it surprised me.

Of course, my plan to be cool in the face of the shark was soon forgotten. I won’t say my heart sped up and I looked around frantically when I lost sight of it, and I certainly won’t say I screamed louder than even my most squeamish female coworker, but I will admit that I took a short, manly breather to compose myself afterwards.

But really, for all its intensity, the shark was the least memorable part of the sequence. What sticks with me most was the awe I felt during the descent. I stared in wonder as vivid tropical fish kept their distance from the cage, and a school of gigantic manta rays came to investigate it. The majesty of the rays was complemented by a series of grand orchestral tones, but the music faded to silence as I entered the dark mouth of the tunnel. Then, after an indiscernible amount of time, I spotted a single luminescent jellyfish in the gloom. Before I knew it, they were all around me, and the music had resumed, only this time softer and with a note of longing. It was the most beautiful thing I had seen in months.

When I took the mask off, it felt like returning from a long journey. It was hard to believe that nothing had really happened. There was a bored-looking guy sitting on the couch, checking his phone. I handed the headset to the next person in line. And the event that had lasted so many minutes for the other players was over in a heartbeat.

So I Was Sitting at This Desk…

I was now a fresh convert to the church of VR, but the team lead whose house we were at was more of a fanatical archbishop. He had three VR gaming systems—the PlayStation VR and two Oculus Rifts. Over the course of the evening, I used all of them, and literally everything I tried impressed me. I was beginning to understand his devotion to this technology.

After several hours, the party had cleared of all but the host, me, and a few of my fellow interns. We gathered around an Oculus Rift for one last game.

The game was called Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. It had a unique premise. One player wore the VR mask and manipulated a bomb that only he could see. He described the bomb to the players back in the real world, who used paper manuals to determine how to safely defuse it. Descriptions and instructions would fly back and forth. With the bomb’s timer ticking down, it made for an exciting challenge.

But my most unforgettable experience that night didn’t happen during the rush to defuse a bomb. It happened in between rounds, when everyone else went to get drinks and I was left alone with the headset.

I was in the game’s lobby, a virtual bureaucrat’s office where you could flip through a binder to select levels. I was sitting in a chair in both the simulated and the physical world, which made the illusion especially seamless. It was so convincing that I kept trying to rest my elbows on my virtual desk.

I was admiring the realism of the environment—hours had done nothing to lessen the novelty—when I had the idea to toss the binder across the room. It was the best idea I had had all night. The trajectory and rotation of the binder as it flew were jaw-droppingly natural. It even fanned open in exactly the way you would expect. For a moment I was depressed that I had thrown it out of my reach, but then I noticed a button that you could push to reset the room. I spent the next three minutes flinging the binder against the wall and pressing the button, giggling like an idiot.

When my friends came back and tapped me on the shoulder, the first thing I did was try to set the controllers down on the desk, but they fell right through. Thankfully I was wearing the wrist straps, so they didn’t drop all the way to the floor.

I threw the mask off and tried to explain how perfect the physics in the room were, but I wasn’t at my most articulate in my giddy state. Our archbishop host just smiled and nodded knowingly, as if to say, “Yes, my child, you are beginning to see the light.”

For the rest of the summer, whenever I would evangelize VR (which was pretty much daily), my coworkers would make fun of me.

“You did so many amazing things that night. You fought off a shark and climbed a mountain, but your stories always begin with, ‘so I was sitting at this desk…’”

The Night I Became an Optimist

When I got home from the party, I knew my life had been altered. VR had caught me completely off guard. Technology was fifty years ahead of where I had thought it was. We could literally put someone in any environment, simulating its sounds, appearance, and movement perfectly. All that was left was to incorporate haptic feedback—the sense of touch—and then the virtual world would be indistinguishable from reality.

Until that day, I had always called myself a pessimist, but I decided optimist was now more appropriate. The next morning, I invested in the stock market for the first time in my life. I figured that any bet on the continued success of the human race was a good one.

I began to think about technology trends beyond VR, how almost every interesting human achievement has occurred in the last hundred and fifty years. Air conditioners, microwaves, antibiotics, airplanes, televisions, satellites, and cell phones were all twentieth century inventions. My parents grew up without the internet.

And now we’re talking about computers that translate languages, recognize images, and generate photorealistic pictures of people who don’t exist. We’re starting to whisper about self-driving cars, quantum computing, and brain-computer interfaces. The revolution in genetics is a miracle by itself. And all these things build upon each other, making it easier to learn and easier to create. Behind it all, no one seems to realize that virtual reality is about to render the physical world secondary, that we are a couple simple, concrete steps away from living in digital universes of our own design.

VR is not the Wii, and this exponential progress is not a gimmick. Next time I feel bored at a family get together, finally tired of whatever newfangled gadget my uncle is showing off, maybe I’ll glance outside at the giant metal birds leaving silver trails across the sky. Maybe I’ll pull up Uber on my phone and watch the cars trace the roads around the house, ready to take me anywhere at the push of a button. Or maybe I’ll just spend a moment in silence, amazed that I’ve seen more magic in my twenty years than all the monarchs in the history books. Because we’re living in a sci-fi world, and no one can imagine what happens next.