Virtual Reality

About a dozen or more years ago, my late wife and I were friends with a couple down the hall in our apartment building. They were architects who were working in the virtual reality of the time, an environment called Second Life. They got me interested enough in this online world that I took out a subscription and paid my yearly dues of $72 for almost a decade.

For those who are not familiar with the program, it’s a cartoon-like environment in which you operate as a cartoon-like figure or “avatar.” The point is, you can go places in the environment and meet and react with other people’s avatars. The program gives you an allowance of “Linden dollars”—named for the program’s creator—with your subscription, and you can always buy more.¹ With this currency you can buy property and build a house, a castle, or a shop to sell the things you make online inside the program. You can also buy physical enhancements for your avatar, as well as clothing and jewelry.

Our friends were working on a digital town hall to discuss political issues. And, as architects and generally brilliant people, they were using the program to build virtual houses for their clients. This was genius, because most architects work in two dimensions: they can draw a floor plan of your building on paper, laying out the rooms, hallways, doors, and closets; they can then draw an elevation, showing how the floors fit together; and they can do a rendering to show how the outside will work. And if the client can think three-dimensionally, interpreting the plans and elevations into a vision of real space, that’s good enough. But the genius of working in Second Life, or any virtual space, is that these architects could create an entire house of the mind for their client’s to walk through. Then the future owners could discover the hidden problems in the place they were requesting, like how this drawer in the kitchen, when opened, blocked the refrigerator door. The architects could also command a sun to shine on the house and show the future owners what natural light each of the rooms would get, with the windows they had specified, during the course of a day. It was a really great use of virtual space.

This couple went on to adopt the sort of virtual space now embodied in the Quest headsets and the Meta environment. When last we talked, they were developing virtual training programs for doctors and nurses, letting them practice on virtual patients with virtual scalpels in an environment with all the bells and whistles—that is, with anesthesia equipment, heart-lung bypass, and monitors—of an operating room. What a concept!²

At one point early on, the couple showed my wife and me a sample virtual-reality program of the time, not medical training but a balloon ride across the Arctic. You put on the headset, and you saw an icefield that stretched for miles. You looked down, and you saw the ground below and the edge of the basket. You looked up and you saw the bulge of the colorfully striped balloon. You turned your head. You turned around. Everywhere you looked, you saw more of the environment. Since that one experience—which we took while standing outside a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop—I’ve tried on demonstration headsets that let you stand in a hallway and let a dinosaur walk over you. And there are now virtual-reality games—which I have not yet tried, because all of this is Windows-based, and I’m an Apple user—where you inhabit the environment, use weapons, fight with, and kill opponents. But you need to mark out and watch the edges of the actual space you’re standing in because, you know, furniture.

So, I was excited when Apple announced its Apple Vision Pro headset, and I signed up for an in-store demonstration. It is not sold as virtual reality but as a kind of augmented reality. With the use of several cameras and stereoscopic vision—one screen for each eye—the headset shows your own environment: the room you’re sitting in, the street you’re walking on, all in three dimensions and real time. The view can also be three-dimensional panoramas, either the ones that come with the software or ones you take with your iPhone 15. Or the view can be an “immersive” environment—so far just those supplied with the headset—that is like our earlier balloon ride. Superimposed on any of these environments, you can see and manipulate your software applications. Cameras inside the headset track your eyes to indicate the application you’re looking at and the selection you want to make. Cameras below the headset watch your hands for various gestures—tapping your fingers together, pulling invisible taffy in various directions—to indicate what you want to do with the application controls. You can also watch your favorite streaming service on the equivalent of an IMAX screen that stretches across your living room—or across the streetscape.

Given that this Apple headset is a self-contained computer, with two high-resolution monitors—one for each eye—plus various cameras for eye tracking, background capture, and hand gestures, plus a built-in stereo system, and a new operating system … the $3,500 price does not seem unreasonable. You would pay about that for a full-featured MacBook these days. And adding to the headset’s memory is actually cheaper than on a MacBook.

But it’s not yet virtual reality, and Apple doesn’t promise that they will ever offer it. That is, you can stand in an immersive environment, and you can manipulate programs and games within it. But you won’t meet anybody else or get to fight and kill them—or not yet, if ever.

And I mostly use my computer for writing and editing, photography, page layout, and internet surfing. I can already do this on the big monitor at my desk, working on a real keyboard and not the virtual keyboard where I need to stare at each key and tap my fingers together to press it. I could also Bluetooth a real keyboard or a MacBook to the headset, but that kind of defeats the purpose of being able to work while sitting in my armchair, lying on the bed, or walking down the street.

So, while I remain interested in virtual reality, I’m not ready to transfer to the Windows world to get it. And I’m not going to shell out thirty-five Benjamins or more to Apple on the suggestion that the Vision Pro one day, maybe, will offer it. Not until I can actually go in there, fight, and kill something.

1. When I finally quit the program after about eight or nine completely inactive years, I had accumulated enough “Linden dollars” to probably buy my own island. I left a fortune in Second Life.

2. For the record, their work resulted in forming the medical training company Acadicus.