VR in Public

~ 2 Minute Read.

I was con­front­ed with an in­ter­est­ing sit­u­a­tion re­cent­ly: since I show around We­b­VR Pong ev­ery­where, I brought a Gear VR along with me to a din­ner to show my fa­ther and broth­ers.

While I am to­tal­ly used to wear­ing some VR head­set any­where, my fa­ther seemed rather un­com­fort­able with oth­er peo­ple watch­ing. On the one side you are ob­vi­ous­ly fo­cused on some tech­nol­o­gy, shut­ting out the rest of the world. But where have we seen this be­fore? I see an anal­o­gy to smart­phones here, ex­cept that tex­ting usu­al­ly en­tire­ly grasps your at­ten­tion and you do not in­ter­act with your sur­round­ings at all any­more un­til you’re done.

With VR it’s dif­fer­ent, though. Not on­ly do you need to com­mu­ni­cate in­struc­tions on how to use the de­vice, but you al­so get a lot of feed­back! Have you ev­er seen any­body silent­ly use a VR de­vice? No! Ev­ery­body com­ments on what he’s do­ing, shar­ing the ex­pe­ri­ence, mak­ing it so­cial.

If ev­ery­body—not just one per­son that is be­ing de­moed to—is us­ing VR at the same time, they may share a vir­tu­al space.

LEAP Mo­tion re­cent­ly nailed the con­cept of Mir­ror­worlds. Ba­si­cal­ly re­al­i­ty be­ing in­cor­po­rat­ed in­to the vir­tu­al re­al­i­ty, e.g. by match­ing the ge­om­e­try of the re­al world, and I am ex­cit­ed about ex­pe­ri­enc­ing this in a shared space with fam­i­ly and friends some day.

Writ­ten in 20 min­utes, ed­it­ed in 5 min­utes.