Like most people I spend much of the day digitally connected, gazing at screens that make my life and work more interesting and productive. Yet for all the positives that connectivity provides us there’s also a downside lurking in those glowing pixels.
Source: www.wired.com
Like most people I spend much of the day digitally connected, gazing at screens that make my life and work more interesting and productive. Yet for all the positives that connectivity provides us there’s also a downside lurking in those glowing pixels.
They’re just not real. So as we extend our Internet time, we risk getting sucked into an isolated virtual reality that lacks the richness, emotional relevance and real experiences engendered by the analog world.
Facebook made a big bet on the virtual reality vision of the future with its recent $2 billion acquisition of Occulus RV, developer of the powerful new virtual reality headset Rift. Rift directly stimulates parts of the brain’s visual cortex, immersing users in an engineered hyper-reality.
Great for gamers, to be sure, but Facebook’s ultimate goal is for this technology to become the next big computing platform after smartphones and tablets, for applications in schools, healthcare and entertainment. In this troubling scenario, the only reality we might experience will be artificial simulations inside helmets or goggles that prevent us from touching, seeing, feeling or interacting with a real person or object.
See on Scoop.it – augmented world