Virtual Reality will Make Reality a Relative Term — Real Virtualities | VU Dream

6 min readApr 22, 2017

Originally published at www.vudream.com on April 22, 2017.

“I have a feeling virtual reality will further expose the conceit that ‘reality’ is a fact. It will provide another reminder of the seamless continuity between the world outside and the world within, delivering another major hit to the old fraud of objectivity. ‘Real’, As Kevin Kelly put it, ’Is going to be on of the most relative words we’ll have.”
– JohnPerry Barlow

Virtual Reality sparked an interest in me because it’s vast potential to help people. I did some research and I found the astounding potential that VR has to disrupt almost every industry.

Autism, PTSD, Surgery, Architecture, Retail were some of the uses that baffled me.

Social virtual reality will essentially rendering location irrelevant.

When people hear the term virtual reality some might think “oh no this technology is going to make people so much more distant. People aren’t going to want to go outside and talk to their friends and use virtual reality as an escape from reality.

Maybe, that could be the case, who knows?

But, technology is the only thing that has ever pushed humanity forward. Examples include sticks that extended our reach to get that piece of fruit from the tree, the industrial revolution, or the digital revolution.

Take the cellphone for example. You can spend all day on your phone looking down, doing god knows what, looking at random things, wasting your time, your day, your life away looking at thousands of multicolored pixels stimulating your brain with dopamine.

Or you can see the other side and see that UNICEF said that the cell phone is the greatest invention for lifting people out of poverty.

There’s always two sides. I happen to be in the boat that thinks technology is going to save the universe.

For those who say they don’t want to be taken out of reality to experience a virtual one, I say to you this:

Objective Reality doesn’t exist.

Reality is coupled to perception and perception can be mediated.

Certain music can change how we process a scene, a moment can seem truthful, or dishonest, depending on the tone, depending on whether it’s cloudy or sunny, depending on your location.

Perception can be manipulated, which is what reality is based off.

With virtual reality, you can see something from someone’s point of view.

It’s not an upgrade to TV it’s a piece of someone’s life. It’s making us able to experience inter-subjectivity. It’s not an upgrade to TV it’s something entirely different.

VR is NOT about using your own senses, rather a portal into a constructed world of imagination.

Deictic Shift

There’s this phenomenon I read about recently in cinema, the Deictic shift. This is when there is diminished activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex, which handles body awareness.

The Deictic shift is when the viewer assumes the viewpoint of the character. Living in the world as someone else. It’s a trade in subjectivity.

This happens in movies. It’s what the director does in the scene, the lighting, the framing, the tone. That’s why directors are so picky about how each scene is captured.

Now apply that to Virtual Reality. VR will obliterate all sense of separation in the story world. The human desire to be immersed is so powerful that it’s not only suspending disbelief but actually creating an active belief to reinforce our own belief in the mediated story world.

“Immersion is the experience of losing oneself in a fictional world. It’s what happens when people are not merely informed or entertained but actually slip into a manufactured reality.”
– Frank Rose

Virtual Reality technology is nothing but an opportunity to create and construct story worlds and narratives of the future.

Such narratives that have the potential to change what it means to be human through shared intersubjectivity that was never possible before.

Artists, filmmakers, musicians are all reality engineers, always changing the perception of the viewer.

VR is the tool, the technology medium that creatives have all been waiting for ever since the existence of time.

Imagine if the technology of the piano or the painting hadn’t been invented for Mozart or Picasso to express their enthusiasm on and evidently changing the world.

Psychic Continuity & Instructive Media

Humans are minds.

Mind is not bound by time, space, distance

“Noam Chomsky talks about the psychic continuity. When we watch a piece of film, that is 24still images per second then you introduce editing, cutting and cross cutting, across time, across space, yet psychic continuity leads the events together and creates a contiguous experience. The human mind has no problem in orienting its awareness towards dimensions in which time is no longer linear.”
– Jason Silva

Mind unplugs from the body, transcends from the body into a mediated real virtuality.

Human beings have been trying to get something as close to virtual reality as possible ever since the existence of life.

“Gothic cathedrals (and IMAX theaters) provide instructive examples of the conscious use of artistic media — space, form, light, sounds — to produce religious-mystical, i.e. psychedelic, experiences.”
– Timothy Leary

Instructive media has been used throughout history to invoke a state of awe. In order to transcend your mind, to remove you from reality in a moment of illumination, a state where you enter ecstatic flow where you lose yourself. Smashing your self-awareness, losing yourself completely in imagination.

Humans have been doing this for thousands of years with cathedrals, paintings, mountain views, sunsets, surround sound system, and the IMAX theater.

Virtual Reality is the next technological step.

VR is the Second Wave of Human Evolution

“our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts”
– Terrence Mckenne

Virtual Worlds will allow minds to live inside our own minds

We already see this coming to life.

Project Sansar is a new platform for creating social VR experiences.

Sansar will democratize VR as a creative medium, making it easy for people to create, share, and monetize their own social VR experiences.

Slated for public release in early 2017, Sansar is now available for creators by invitation only.

Imagine living in worlds of our own creations, icons of youth, posters, or even living inside of a pop song.

Before a constructed dream world of mine, if I want to share the contents of my mind, I smile, I move my lips in a way, I make crude little grunts to convey meanings. I paint a painting, I write a poem, article etc.

Virtual Reality is an idea of fully immersive technology-mediated dream worlds. Rendered mind spaces for the creative and consciousness.

Virtual Reality is Reality enhanced. Hyperreality.

Portals to another world. Real Virtualities.

Technology will allows us to share dreams with each other

Everybody will have a cosmos of imagination where they can build cathedrals of the mind.

Do you want to see what it’s like to be inside of my mind?

Imagine what will become possible. Imagine the exchange of intersubjectivity, understanding, and empathy humanity can unleash with real virtualities.

Conclusion

Check back on this page frequently for updates and additions.

We’ve seen a tremendous amount of disruptive change coming from the Virtual Reality Industry. It is surely certain that this kind of content will accelerate based on trends in the future.

You most likely have some other VR ideas that can change the world! Share them with us on social media!