So I’ve generally been pretty down on VR. It hasn’t interested me to do development in and with rare exception I haven’t had any real interest in playing with or engaging in VR applications. The main reason being their interaction with the whole body.

One of the deep lessons I took from The Phenomenology of Perception is that our experience of perception isn’t as simple as “sound goes into the sound part of the brain” and “sight goes into the sight part of the brain”. We perceive with our whole body, in a complex interaction with between the consciousness and physical self, where how perceptions are understood is also non-trivially dependent on what we have experienced and what we expect to experience. We perceive our environment even in ways that we’re not directly getting data for. As I’m typing, I can “see” and “feel” the kitchen behind me. I can feel the presence of my partners in the apartment and sounds are interpreted through the knowledge that they are here and moving.

So we come to VR. VR bothers me because, on a fundamental level, it tries to give your body & consciousness information at cross purposes, thing that are fundamentally contradictory. Your awareness of what’s around you is paradoxical with the open space the headset is giving you and the attempt to project a locational sense of sound through earbuds. Your virtual body can, and will, move in ways that your physical body cannot accept: hence the reason VR gives most people some kind of motion sickness or vertigo.

These are the reasons I’ve been cool on VR. It seemed like it could be a neat novelty but never entirely a satisfying experience. I realize that I was wrong, though, and it was through the odd coincidence of simultaneously reading the paper The Weird Giggle: Attending to Affect in Virtual Reality while also having on a playthrough of the game Lone Echo in the background. In Lone Echo you’re playing as a robot living in zero G. You have to move like a robot in zero G and interact with the environment in this way. Yet, you’re quite obviously not experiencing a zero G environment.

Now we’re getting into the territory of The Weird Giggle. This is a paper that leans very heavily on the language of affect theory and references to Deleuze, but I don’t necessarily think that heavy of machinery is necessary for the point they’re making. The way I’d summarize it is that the friction between the virtual and the experience of our body that’s also grounded in the physical world causes all experiences in the virtual to feel conspicuous, more noticeable and intense. In this way, the disorientation from movement-without-movement, the shock from running into boundaries in the real world that belie the openness of the world you see, etc. are not failings of VR but potentially important things to study & opportunities for art that could not be made in any other way.

One of the points of the paper is that there’s no such thing as “passivity” in VR, everything feels much more active, but also at the same time you feel like you have less freedom than in traditional media, the gear of VR itself dulls your other senses and puts restrictions on your sense of body & movement.

VR allows for movement in new ways, ways that we wouldn’t normally express. In the context of this paper, they’re describing experimental dance performances, but I think a video game where you have to pantomime pulling yourself along a space station in zero g counts as well.

So, again, that’s why I realize that I was wrong. There’s lots to explore in VR, but most of it is going to be far weirder than anything we’ve done yet. We need to go harder on bizarreness of interface & perspective. We need to be willing to commit to strange motion and interaction that wouldn’t make any sense for our actual bodies, maybe even playing with the feelings of restriction and paradox that come from literally covering your eyes and ears & only being able to move in a small space. I’m picturing highly non-planar geometries or ones that operate by pathologic metrics, where space & time aren’t experienced at all like our physical world. Exaggerate the feeling of traversing hundreds of miles in only a few square feet, play with the sense of scale. We can study and learn so much about ourselves and how we experience the world this way.