The problem with VR (article)

[Eidolon]

IN 2000, a semi-retired American man purchased a brand-new 32-foot Winnebago motor home. On his first trip home, having joined the freeway, he set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the driver's seat to go into the back and make himself a cup of coffee. Not surprisingly the Winnebago left the freeway, crashed and overturned. The man in question sued Winnebago for not advising him in the handbook that he couldn't actually do this. He was awarded $1,750,000. Plus a new Winnebago.

The ineptitude on display here is truly scary, is it not? The only thing that surpasses his ineptitude is the brass-faced cheek of attempting - and succeeding - to profit from his stupidity. Now, the fact that the above story is almost certainly apocryphal is besides the point: the point I'm trying to make is that there are some seriously dim-witted individuals about. And the reason I point that out is that it may be a big, big problem for the widespread adoption of VR.

As I see it, VR has three main stumbling blocks to mass adoption.

1. Nausea

No man worth his salt ever reads the manual. It's just a fact of life. With the Oculus Rift Development Kit, we're already hearing similar tales of buyers who breathlessly rip their cherished new toy from its box, slam it over their faces and try to spend the next three hours straight playing Portal. Don't laugh, it's happening. The focus is all wrong, the IPD settings are completely out of whack, and within five minutes they are already experiencing their first wave of VR-induced nausea. They can't focus on real-world things, they feel clumsy and knock things over, and the feeling doesn't go away for days. It may be self-inflicted, it may be entirely avoidable, but nonetheless this is just a microcosm of what will happen when these VR headsets go on general sale to the average Joe.

It's one thing to say the commercial version will have better head tracking, or automatic IPD/focus adjustment, or any number of improvements, but the simple truth is that - in real-life - there are many things we do that can easily make you feel nauseous, some of which are quite benign. I have an Uncle who can drive a car - or be a passenger - for miles and miles with no undue effect. But put him on a bus and within ten minutes he is sick. Violently so. There is no logic involved here - it's just an example of a psychosomatic response to fairly arbitrary stimulii. And everybody's tolerances are different and unique: one person I know has a pathological fear of flying, and when vacationing is perfectly willing to spend 48 hours solid travelling on buses and boats to avoid them. Can you imagine how long she'd last playing Flight Simulator XV in VR?

The point I'm trying to make is that there'll be plenty of people who will go out and buy an Oculus Rift, plonk it on their heads, completely ignore every rule in the book and end up making themselves sick as Parrots for days. It might be funny to a degree, but it will have repercussions for VR headset makers as, rightly or wrongly, some of these people are going to blame those same manufacturers. Some may even try to sue. The real problems will arise when some guy who has been jacked in for twenty hours straight jumps into his car and mows down some pedestrians.

Unfortunately this first point is fairly unavoidable. Making VR a compelling experience will involve giving the consumer an experience that would be difficult, expensive, dangerous or impossible in real life. If a simple car journey is enough to make some people sick then the same thing will inevitably happen in VR too, but amplified. And the more time you spend shark wrestling and base jumping in VR, the more likely you are to fall foul to your mind's coping mechanisms.

2. VR in the wrong hands

There are plenty of people who lack the ability to differentiate reality from fantasy: the very young, for instance, or people who are highly suggestive, or those in altered mental states (whether through disease, drugs or alcohol). Even as a fully-grown, healthy male, I occasionally mix up a real memory with a dream I've had.

Given that, it's a sobering thought to imagine little Johnny happening upon his Dad's untended VR headset, un-pausing the Omaha Beach level of Call of Duty XI and emerging twenty minutes later exhibiting all the classic signs of shell-shock and post-traumatic stress disorder. Try explaining that to Social Services.

We've all heard the countless stories of the crazies who go on the rampage immediately after having watched their favourite slasher movie, or playing their favourite first-person shooter game. There are also those that use these extreme examples as reasons for banning scary movies and shoot 'em ups in their entirety. As level-headed gamers, we can at least divorce what we see on screen from real life, but as in point one, everyone's line is drawn in the sand in different places, and for a variety of reasons. If there are people who are suggestible enough to go shooting up their School on the strength of some Marilyn Manson lyrics, what is going to happen when we have a VR system capable of giving us utterly compelling experiences of anything we can imagine?

Again, this can only be mitigated to a point: there will always be those who will take it too far, as there will always be those who will seek to ban VR because of it. Ratings systems for movies and video games have largely failed in my experience, with one caveat - when they are curated in controlled environments, for instance at the Cinema. Relying on parents to do the curating has largely failed, but you'd have to agree that the potential to scare the life out of some poor kid with VR does exist, and we must try to plan for this. We've all seen the YouTube video of some three year old with an Oculus Rift on his head, so it's going to happen.

Every new artform has to endure its detractors who will try to pin everything that is wrong with the world on whatever is currently popular in Society. We can mitigate it to an extent by ensuring it's as hard as possible to fall foul of these negative aspects, but they will happen, and it would be pointless trying to deny it will.

3. Addiction/avoidance

In the Red Dwarf series of books, there's a Virtual Reality system called Better Than Life. Those familiar with this will remember that BTL is so good, that its users simply never leave. They waste away in real life until their emaciated bodies finally give up and they die.

Is that so far from what might be on the horizon? I'll be honest, I'm a pretty normal, level-headed guy, but if there were a door in my house that opened onto a HoloDeck, you probably wouldn't see much of me again. I've just won the Cosmic Lottery. Real life simply wouldn't compare. I'd be off dancing on the Event Horizons of Singularities.
There are already those addicted to video games. There were people addicted to video games when the cutting edge was represented by Taito's Space Invaders. Sam Harris, in his 2007 speech The Dangers Of Atheism, made the point that most people seemed to live their lives merely reiterating life's pleasures moment to moment. We seek pleasant sights, sounds, tastes, sensations, attitudes. But these pleasures are fleeting and the best we can do is merely reiterate them as often as we are able. The effort required to keep boredom and dissatisfaction and doubt at bay continues.

Now imagine if we could shortcut the gaps to these moments of happiness. It's like the lab experiment where a Rat has had the pleasure centres of its brain wired to a big red button. Once the Rat learns it gets extreme pleasure every time it presses the button, he'll joyously mash that button furiously until he dies, oblivious to everything around him.

And let's be honest with ourselves, life just sucks sometimes. We are pleasure seeking machines to an extent, and there will be those who will eventually use VR to 'opt out' of reality entirely. And the better and more compelling an experience VR provides, the worse this problem will become.

Again, there will be no avoiding this, but it will at least be mitigated to an extent by certain factors. It will take time to figure out what works and what doesn't, and the kinds of realities envisaged in BTL or the Holodeck are generations away from reality. The kinds of issues our kids will have to worry about are light years from today's.

But then, hasn't that always been the case?

[JDuncan]

Maybe VR is like booze?

Nausea is like a hang over maybe.
Stupid people may need to check into a website that tests if the Oculus is correctly set up before the machine is activated.
And if the machine is on for x number of hours you need to check in online again, if you keep doing this you get some message to try to have some moderation and not go crazy.

[CynicalWanderer]

Very good essay. Covers many of the salient points about potential mass market adoption issues quite well.

1. Perhaps for the consumer rift, Oculus could implement some sort of forced config and profile creation to be run the first time, to "install" the Rift, which acts as a gatekeeper before users can access the games themselves. So if the user hasn't yet taken the five minutes to set up their IPD correctly, and maybe also go through a forced correct usage tutorial of some sort, then the Rift will return a false to whatever the "is Rift connected" call is in the SDK. To the average Joe, this should just seem as normal and expected as the equivalent of installing a device driver, or running a setup.exe installer. By preventing the dumb masses from running the game with an improperly set up Rift, when they do finally complete the profile setup process and go in-game, the likelihood of a bad experience and consequent bad press should be reduced. And by then they will have been cunningly "educated" about the need for setting up a profile.

2/3. Not a lot that can be done here except to have very explicit, very visible warnings and legalese all over the boxes and manuals. And have some good lawyers on retainer. As you described, there will always be some idiot who dies after a three day Skyrim marathon, or fools who walk into walls and break their noses, or some crazy who gets real life and his Postal 2 VR fantasies confused. Part of life and adjusting to new technologies and not Oculus's problem, you'd think, but of course the lawyer jackals will smell blood and will go all out trying to push precedent regardless of whether their inept clients have any actual merit to their cases. As long as Oculus has "documented its cruise control's limits" thoroughly, to borrow your analogy, and not left anything open to interpretation that could be construed as negligence, that should hopefully be enough to fend off most of the lawsuit pests and their nonsense.

[xef6]

Nice writeup.

I'm really hoping that #1 will be mostly solved by higher spec hardware (resolution, refresh rate, brightness, contrast, body tracking, auto-calibration, etc); nausea is definitely my least favorite part of the current dev kit.

#3 strongly reminds me of "closed shell syndrome" from ghost in the shell: http://www.aeriagloris.com/GhostAndShel ... ndrome.htm
Also, opium dens.