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his year I’ve had not one but two expe-
riences for which the descriptive pow-
ers of language fall woefully short. The
first was witnessing the total eclipse of
the sun, a cosmic spectacle that ran a
hot soldering iron across the length of my cerebral cortex,
reducing me to a state of primordial awe that still haunts
my waking moments.
That was my big-bang moment, entirely sacred and
shared with every person lucky enough to be in the path of
totality. My secular big-bang moment, no less profound but
entirely private, happened just last week, when my friends
Jeff and Kassi hooked me into their brand-new virtual real-
ity system. I don’t give much of a shit about how technolo-
gies work; I just want them to perform.
That said, I did ask Jeff to describe, in the crudest terms,
what a virtual reality system entails. His system — a high-
powered computer hooked into a central processing system
(CPU) with an HTC VIVE Steam VR headset, plus a flat-
screen TV and two motion sensors mounted on opposite
walls, near the ceiling — ran him close to a thousand bucks.
What all of this stuff does, again in layman’s terms, is
work together in an intimate and rapid-fire way to create an
immersive, three-dimensional platform that reacts to you
while you react to it through a nearly seamless continu-
um of time and space. Basically, a pair of high-definition
screens interacts in a staggered way to replicate reality,
and dueling sensors shooting iridescent light react to your
movements, replicating the actions of a body in space.
Imagine being able to step into an episode of, say, The
Walking Dead, and moving around the Georgia coun-
tryside with zombies chasing you, all of it as immediate
and panoramic as the reality you just left. The only thing
missing is the tactile, physical pressure of sensory stimuli,
smell and touch and such, with credible impressions of ac-
tual pain and pleasure they bring with them, including the
threat of death — though you’d be amazed how your mind
fills things in. More on that in a minute.
It’s a mistake to think that virtual reality, or at least the
desire for it, is a recent phenomenon. Since the first time
a kid twirled in circles until falling down, human beings
have been trying to derange and alter everyday reality, and
Plato’s allegory of the cave shows that the idea of manu-
factured reality and the shifting scrim of perception have
been a concern for thousands of years. Just ask anyone
who’s ever dropped a hit of acid.
“So,” Jeff asked me, holding the fancy VR headset in
his hand, “are you afraid of the water?” His girlfriend Kas-
si snorted and shook her head.
“Nah, man, I ain’t afraid of the water,” I said. “I grew
up on the ocean. Bring it on.”
Jeff helped me slip into the headset and placed the head-
phones on my head. At first, all I saw was a relatively blank
space into which materialized a grid of stacked transparent
squares described by lines of light. I was inside a box in
three dimensions, which I later learned were the limits of
the actual living room of Jeff and Kassi’s apartment.
Amazing enough. And then, slowly, but not all that
slowly, something happened, and I was standing on the
deck of a rusty sunken ship in the dark depths of the ocean.
Little fish swam by, and I heard the blurping sounds of air
bubbles escaping upward. I walked over to the stern and
peered down: the ship was perched on a reef, and I sud-
denly realized that there was so much sea below me that I
couldn’t see the ocean floor.
My knees buckled and I got scared. Maybe I am a bit
afraid of water.
Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, and we
hallucinate all the time: Consider how often you think you
see a friend, and you’re absolutely positive it’s your friend,
but then it turns out not to be your friend. Your brain fills
in reality when it’s uncertain of what it’s seeing, and fear
and adrenaline work a strange alchemy on the neurological
zip of your perceptions. Things that aren’t really there are
often really there.
Virtual reality works on these uncertainties by creating
a reality convincing enough to cause an almost complete
suspension of disbelief in the person strapped to it. On the
deck of that ship, I craned my neck upward and suddenly
saw the dull orb of the sun glowing on the ocean’s surface,
and I said, “Wow.” And then I looked to my right, and there
was something looking at me. From about a foot away.
I screamed like a little boy. That blue whale wasn’t just
enormous like an enormous simulacrum of a whale you
see on television, which isn’t actually big but just looks big
within the parameters of the screen and by comparison to
its reproduced surroundings. The whale that was eyeball-
ing me was an actual leviathan, in proportion to the reality
I inhabited. It was fucking huge.
“Go away,” I told the whale as I backed slowly in the
opposite direction, running the risk, in my mind, of plung-
ing over the side. “Go away, go away, go away.”
And then it went away, with a gargantuan flap of its tail
that made me jump. I peeled the goggles off. Jeff was look-
ing at me, wide eyed and grinning. He looked like a secret
sharer, a man who has just pulled you aside and given you,
and you alone, the keys to the teleporter.
From there, I was given a two-hour tour through the
current, multiform universe of virtual reality: I bailed out
on a battle with zombies that was just way too intense for
me; I waged combat with a swarm of bulky gladiators in a
game called “Gorn” (gore porn); I entered a 3D replica of
Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”; and I fell from a great height,
an experience so visceral and convincing that I felt it in ev-
ery cell of my body, even after I removed the VR headset.
Someone asked me if virtual reality is, indeed, realistic,
and I now think I have a decent answer to that. On the one
hand, the answer is no: It is not a correlative mirror of what
you are now experiencing, meaning its recreation of reality
is only as good as the recreation of reality in the latest vid-
eo game you play; it is limited only by the graphics that are
designed digitally, by a series of ones and zeroes. I’m not
sure the exactitude of computer animation will ever per-
fectly mimic the messy organic slog of a real body moving
under the weight of gravity. But who knows?
On the other hand, the answer is yes, when you take
into consideration the impossibly complex function of our
brain as it gathers stimuli and processes it into a perceiv-
able story about where, exactly, we are at any given point
in time. Does a dream seem real when you’re dreaming it?
There’s your answer.
Virtual reality, in essence, deranges your senses — the
dream of the Surrealists made manifest. It alters you by
playing on your perceptions to the extent that you convince
yourself it's real. VR exists somewhere in the twilight be-
tween dreaming and wakefulness, or better yet, at its inter-
section, where you dream yourself wide-awake.
Try not to jump when that whale swims up on you. ■
There are a couple ways you can dive into virtual reality locally: VR
Eugene offers on-site tours as well as virtual reality equipment rental,
guidance and consultation, brought right into your home (by appointment
at 541-554-2456, vreugene.com); also, multiVRse: VR Gaming at 1374
Willamette Street is an arcade with a network of virtual reality stations
you can visit and play (open 3 pm to 11 pm every day, 541-221-5172,
multivrse.games).
eugeneweekly.com • September 28, 2017
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