Defying Reality: The Inside Story of the Virtual Reality Revolution

201 Pages·2018·2.58 MB·English

by  David M Ewalt

ALSO BY DAVID M. EWALT
Of Dice and Men:
The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It

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Portions of this book were originally published in Forbes or on Forbes.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Hardcover ISBN: 9781101983713
Ebook ISBN: 9781101983737
Version_1
For my grandfather Michael E. Spinapolice, who bought my
first computer
CONTENTS
Also by David M. Ewalt
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue: THE SPARK
1. PYGMALION’S SPECTACLES
2. THE ULTIMATE DISPLAY
3. CONSOLE COWBOYS
4. INTO THE RIFT
5. TWO BILLION REASONS
6. TAKING HOLD
7. VR AND CODING IN LAS VEGAS
8. THE ONCOMING TRAIN
9. THIS IS REAL
10. WE’LL USE THE ORGASMATRON
11. MAGICAL THINKING
Epilogue: THE AGE OF THE UNREAL
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Prologue
THE SPARK
I
t’s 1894, and a twenty-year-old Italian aristocrat pushes a button on his desk,
causing a bell to ring on the other side of the room. He wakes his mother in
the middle of the night to show her what he’s created. He calls it a wireless
telegraph.
It’s 1927, and a twenty-one-year-old Utah farm boy transmits a live image
from a camera, through the air, to a glowing screen. “That’s it, folks,” he
announces. “We’ve done it—there you have electronic television.”
It’s 2012, and a nineteen-year-old video game fan from California fits a
lightweight plastic headset over his eyes, presses a button on a computer, and is
transported to another world. “I am making great progress,” he tells his friends
later in a post on an Internet forum. “Really excited about this.”
We’ve already entered the age of virtual reality, though you probably
haven’t noticed it yet. You’ve almost certainly heard of VR, seen the news
stories and magazine covers, read about how it’s the hot new medium for 3-D
movies and video games. It’s possible you’ve tried one of the basic VR viewers
that use a phone for a screen. Or maybe you’ve played with or own a high-end
VR headset that connects to a computer.
But unless you’re one of the handful of people who live on the sharpest
point of the cutting edge, you probably haven’t noticed that the release of those
gadgets was the dawn of a whole new era. This isn’t just another beat in the
accelerating tempo of technological progress; it’s the start of a brand-new song.
At the very least, it’s a moment as significant as the birth of radio or television;
quite possibly, it’s the beginning of a fundamental change in what it means to be
human.
No, seriously.
I know that sounds crazy. But this technology gives us the ability to do crazy
things. A virtual reality is a computer-generated environment that you can see
things. A virtual reality is a computer-generated environment that you can see
and hear, typically through the use of a high-tech headset, so that it appears
you’re actually inside the simulation. Good VR even lets the user interact with
and change the environment. Now think about that: Creating a whole new world
that people can inhabit used to be something only deities could do. The ancient
Greeks said Gaia gave birth to the heavens, the sea, and the mountains; in the
twenty-first century, an engineer models them on their laptop.
And think about what it means to inhabit one of these virtual worlds. You
and I are bound to the physical world—we have to work with the body we have
in the place where we are. But as virtual reality simulations get better, both of
those limitations start to go away. Suddenly anyone can see what it’s like to
stand on the peak of Mount Everest. Or a person who can’t walk can experience
a marathon from the perspective of an Olympic champ. And if fantasy is
indistinguishable from reality, why stop there? Take a walk across Mars—hell,
take a walk across Narnia. Become a dragon and fly through the clouds.
Crazy, right? I don’t know what it will do to humanity when we can
experience our fantasies in a manner that’s indistinguishable from real life, but I
do know that the invention of this technology is a pretty big deal. When we talk
about VR, we’re not just talking about gadgets that play 3-D video games.
—
In the interest of transparency, I should admit that I’m exactly the
type of person you’d expect to get overexcited about VR. When I was a child I
was obsessed with fantasy literature, movies, and games. I memorized the maps
in books like The Hobbit, knew the name of every obscure Star Wars character,
and spent countless hours playing Dungeons & Dragons with my friends. I loved
video games too, and I was interested in computer programming. In other words,
I was a stereotypical 1980s nerd.
Then I read William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and it blew my adolescent
mind like a bolt of neon lightning. In this cyberpunk novel’s dystopian future,
hackers transfer their consciousness directly into the Matrix, a virtual reality
representation of a global computer network, and explore cyberspace the same
way a team of adventurers might delve into a dungeon in one of my D&D
games. Gibson’s “console cowboys” navigate traps, fight powerful security
programs, and escape with stolen data treasure. A world where you can fight
monsters and still be a computer genius? I would have moved there if I could.