What's interesting is that for most of my childhood (80s and 90s), aside from a few wow moments I was pretty underwhelmed by the standard of the tech. It was like it was trying hard to be something it wasn't yet ready to be. I used to walk into television shops and think they all just look crap. Computers used to frustrate me so much - crunch crunch to do anything, and 256 colours was deemed good (!?). The first music players where you might be able to get one whole album onto a memory card that was too expensive to put a price in the rs catalogue (or perhaps too volatile a price). Anyway, tech was crap. Then around 2005 or something, it started becoming what it was meant to be. You could buy a computer and it could do everything you needed it to do; of course you always wanted more number crunching, but you could see where it was only just right the corner. Then GPUs started doing computation, and computation stopped being thought about. Memory was super fast and copious. One now felt limited by programming capability, not hardware. I'm now genuinely excited by technology. As much as it pains me to say it, the television departments are places of wonder.
It's in that context that this post feels like another step towards achieving some promised vision. If this is realtime, it is truly fantastic.
Now to hope we can deal with climate change and despots and poverty so it's not all for nought.
As an aside, one early wow moment was the first time I saw a mini camcorder, then another for the first genuinely mobile phone; both Sony I think. Also, though a bit later, I remember seeing an in-car GPS and deciding it was basically a perfect interface for it's task.
If you're interested in tech becoming really magic, lookup the VRchat club scene. Real-life skilled DJs put out of clubs by covid, setup a twitch stream with a webcam on their DJ controller, while wearing full-body VR themselves, also streaming their DJ software and in-game view to an in-world stage screen in front of up to 80 guests, many if not most also wearing full-body VR, dancing along together, in any kind of digital world and wearing any kind of semi-humanoid (or not) 3D model you can imagine. The "metaverse" has already been running for a few years, but it's not Meta's, it's a thin multiplayer VR wrapper over Unity.
Yes even voice chat feels dystopian if thats all your interaction with other humans. Social platforms have ironically made us less social beings. Real ourselves live in the digital world while our fake zombie selves do the mundane tasks in the real world. It does not feel right at all. Its easier to connect and find similar people through internet so i get why it is like this, but i think its also the factor thats making us less mentally balanced, causing real world to feel more foreign and harder to interact with. Drug of social interaction that's not real which leaves you lonely in the end.
I would say the cause is that current internet social connection techniques don't have enough depth to them. Telephone doesn't let you see hand or facial emotions of the other person. Twitter/facebook is only using a keyboard + reading text. Instagram you can see a snapshot of an instant and peoples thoughts about that instant. etc...
VR is working to try and bridge all of these by essentially creating a transporter/teleporter to a shared physical space. Imagine if VRChat was a 1-to-1 replication of you. I feel like this is one of the end goals of VR.
Its easier to connect and find similar people through internet so i get why it is like this, but i think its also the factor thats making us less mentally balanced
This isn't true of just internet, this is true of cities. People no longer care about one another, each person/bond is replaceable with another one. i.e dating apps only help prove this fact. We no longer need to rely on one another to survive and therefore are more independent. We are less willing to give up (sacrifice) parts of our independence and less tolerant of flaws in others. I think this is what leads to higher divorce rates now. How many people live in high rise buildings and actually know many of their neighbors?
It’s that you’re alone in a room with a screen strapped to your face looking at pixels instead of seeing, touching, feeling, smelling, hearing, sweating, dancing, and sensing in the middle of a rave of physical human beings
It’s literally senseless in comparison, lossy digitalization of basic analog humanity ie dystopian
It's in that context that this post feels like another step towards achieving some promised vision. If this is realtime, it is truly fantastic.
Now to hope we can deal with climate change and despots and poverty so it's not all for nought.
As an aside, one early wow moment was the first time I saw a mini camcorder, then another for the first genuinely mobile phone; both Sony I think. Also, though a bit later, I remember seeing an in-car GPS and deciding it was basically a perfect interface for it's task.