Balance by Carol Svec

Author:Carol Svec
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2017-10-02T16:00:00+00:00

10

Beyond Gravity

Virtual Reality

I AM IN AN ITALIAN VILLAGE with the most annoying carousel music playing in a continuous, inescapable loop. The few people around are all ignoring me, but that’s OK. I’m here not for the culture but for the view, which is mildly breathtaking. I want to walk through an archway toward the sea, but I keep ending up outside of a building that looks like a cathedral. It feels like I am moving around in someone else’s dream—everything looks animated, and yet nothing looks familiar. Worse, I seem to have very little control over where I am going. I press forward, but I move sideways.

“I find that knob very difficult to use, I must say,” says Dr. Laurence Harris, professor of psychology, kinesiology, and health sciences at York University in Toronto, Canada. This was the last stop on my tour of his multisensory perception labs. “Try wiggling the control around a bit. See if you can pull it up and down, rotate around, and push it forwards and backwards.”

This is my first experience with virtual reality (VR)—the first of three I would test while researching this chapter—and I have a temperamental control stick. That doesn’t stop me from loving every minute of it. I have always been a sucker for any kind of mind-machine interface. I remember my first experience with a video game that was more interactive than Pong. It was called Zork, a text-only adventure fiction game that I could run on my home computer. There were no graphics, just words on a screen that described a scene and the mission. The user (me) could type in commands, which the computer “understood” via sophisticated text-parsing software. It was fantasy literature that could be played like a one-person Dungeons & Dragons game. I tried Nintendo games a couple of times, and I found that I was prone to becoming obsessed with visually engaging games. For the sake of my marriage and my sanity, I decided it was safer for me not to own a gaming system. My biggest visual vice right now is going to see 3-D IMAX movies. I have never become sick or dizzy in an IMAX theater, and it never gets old. Needless to say, I love virtual reality Italy.

For this experience, I climbed up some metal steps to a large platform that held a large, curved screen; a bank of 3-D stereoscopic projectors; and a chair with controllers. After I was seated, the chair moved forward so that it felt as though I were sitting inside the curve of the screen, with the sides winged out to make sure that all I saw was screen, even in my peripheral vision. This was full visual field virtual reality.

It is difficult to accurately describe the experience of virtual reality to someone who hasn’t experienced it. It is a re-creation of the world. When you look at “real” reality, it is all around you. It is the ceiling and the floor,1 and a 360-degree panorama around you.

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