What is like to ride a VR roller coaster
Actually that VR roller coaster ride in Copenhagen was not either the first nor the last time I would put a headset on, but I am down for the click-bait.
Virtual reality first came to my life about two years ago. After a months-long shipping delay that involved a fake home-built package I made to troll my housemate, the actual Oculus Rift came home. And we were definitely more damned than the guy who had the very first one delivered home by its own developer. However, after such a long wait all I could expect was another disappointing gaming accessory made big by the media hype-machine. Especially with all those articles claiming the consumer-facing VR outbreak after a long way off. I found soon enough I was mistaken as the day I first put the headset on will be always remembered as the day social life ended.
Oculus Rift happened to be anything but that 360-degree headset from a 90s arcade place I expected it to be. Visuals and sound simulation proved themselves as a great way to trick the brain into creating a great feeling of presence. Even a side-scrolling cartoony game made you consider to stay permanently connected to the stunning virtual world (it really sounds like druggy rambling). Yet total immersion and sensory deception were a given, it actually surprised me the way virtual reality replicates the natural living experience — it leaves you hesitant to accept you have not moved the room. It feels that natural that my first thought when putting the headset in was ‘Ok, my whole life is a lie’ followed by ‘God, my mother is going to be worried as I will not answer the phone anymore’, and so she was. She spent the following two months thinking I was not eating or sleeping but playing. And so I was.
But full immersion and game addition is not what I found more interesting about playing with VR—is even ‘playing’ an accurate verb anymore? —Oculus Rift turned out to be a really though-provoking technology. Not only because it blurs the lines between what is considered to be real and what is considered to be virtual (shall societal rules still apply?), but also because it messes so much with your brain chemistry that it is fairly common to suffer from some potential, physical reactions besides from fatigue and motion sickness.
Being said I kept myself conscious of the fact I was playing a game all the way through, I could not prevent myself from having some unpleasant body responses. Possibly the most common reaction I can recall is the gut-drop feeling and shacking from falling down a cliff. But at an early stage I also started noticing problems to coordinate eye and hand movement and a slightly inability to gauge distance and spatial relation. Soon I found myself unable to tell where my real body ended up. Long after the exposure, I was still struggling to tell for sure the length of my arm and to react accordingly. In short, I was adjusting my physical awareness based on the VR experience.
This is absolutely astounding since we are hard-wired from our childhood to perceive body image. We, as adults, perceive our bodies as physically moving through space as a result of a life-long learning… that can be easily tricked by a single device. Another interesting side effect is derealization/dissociation which has been reported by many users on the Internet. It seems like almost every VR user has experienced that afterwards feeling where the entire world looks desaturated and generally boring, and your body seems unreal to you.
This personal experience is mainly a friendly reminder that you do not want to mess too much with your brain chemistry (let alone doing this). But it also may serve as an evidence that immersion has little or nothing to do with believable computer graphics, sophisticated haptic technology and surround sound, and more with messing with the human factors involved in achieving a state of presence. Full immersion as to provoke body boundary ambiguity.
Jumping over to that roller coaster story in Denmark, it was truly enjoyable but nothing like that very first time. However, considering that body awareness is learnt on early childhood, for those kids on the picture it could actually have changed the way they perceive the world on a deep level.
tl;dr
Come on, go back to the top and read the bloody article. I mixed gaming, drugs and roller coasters all together, WHAT ELSE DO YOU WANT.
