It appears that 2016 will be the year that virtual reality (VR) will start to matter in the mainstream. Both Sony PlayStationVR and the much talked about Occulus Rift headsets are planned to be unleashed on the consumer market in the first half of the year. It remains to be seen how much actual content there will be initially, but once the hardware is released we can expect it to flow more and more rapidly.
No doubt the hardware will also improve quickly too. All sorts of tricks will be added to turn what is now basically a wrap around screen in a helmet into a more total sensory experience.
One interesting feature of commentary about VR is that it is almost entirely concerns itself with two areas. First, games and entertainment—we hear about the even more exciting ways we can watch or participate in even more immersive fantasies. Great stuff I’m sure, and certainly worth experiencing, but of limited importance to anyone not, at that moment, wearing a silly helmet.
Amazing! I really can see through it
The second group make comments about the impact on people and society. Strangely though the focus is always on the negative, depicting people engaging in an orgy of game playing and simulated sex while completely losing interest and motivation for real life. A trap to be sure and some will fall into it, but it’s very much a Luddite view of what may prove one of the great life improving technical advances. For people who are not seduced into losing the difference between reality and fantasy, VR may present an opportunity to forge a better life.
John Lennon’s song imagine goes through a list of things which could be eliminated in his imaginings of a better time or place. Socialist nonsense mostly appealing to totalitarians and their useful idiots, but a handy format for looking at some impacts of VR. It’s always easier to predict the areas eliminated by change than it is to predict the new uses of technology. So we will focus on the impressive list of present day things which virtual reality might eliminate or dramatically reduce.
1. Imagine no schools
Is this the real school of tomorrow?
School, college, university, and training are mostly about learning rather than doing. The student aims not to produce a real world impact or product so much as to change his own mind into a form which might be productive and influential in the future.
Imagine migrating education to VR with little need to leave home at all. Over time it should be possible for every student to take classes from the best teacher in the world. The need for land, buildings, teachers and equipment could be reduced to a fraction of what is required today.
2. Imagine no offices
Will physical offices go down the drain?
Offices work is paper, computer and mind work. Presently it requires huge and expensive buildings, equipment, and infrastructure.
Imagine migrating office work to VR with little need to leave home at all. Visit your tax accountant while getting a back massage. Have a chat with your boss wearing a perfectly pressed, automatic suit avatar. Meanwhile you are at the gym, on an exercise bike. All those impressive, but now obsolete, office towers in the center of cities? That’s where your new apartment is.
3. Imagine no down time
Among the more annoying features of life at present are the inevitable gaps between value adding activities. Mobile phones and other technology have already made some progress in using up this time, but so far it is really more about eliminating boredom than doing useful things for most people.
Imagine a world where VR offers genuinely worthwhile or productive ways to use down time for work or leisure. Just set the alarm on the VR headset and it starts. Spend a few minutes polishing that report at the office, socialize, attend a class or just watch the running of the bulls as if you were really there right next to that poor guy who gets a horn through some private part of his body. It remains to be seen whether the elimination of down time is a feature or a bug of VR, but it is one change that will take place.
4. Imagine no first times
I broke my leg on the first jump but it didn’t even hurt
One of the big problems in life is that people have to learn to perform a task before they can be good at it. Many of the failed and shoddy jobs that gets done result from this learning process.
Imagine the process of learning by doing was migrated to VR in many instances. From changing a light bulb, to changing an engine, to building a house, to creating your own gigantic stone sculpture. A wide range of tasks could be done, without the risks to self and property, in VR and with the best instruction. Then do them in real life as a second, or more, timer. It would even be possible for children to learn to do such tasks before they are old enough to be capable of taking them on.
5. Imagine no commute
A large fraction of time spent on working is really just time getting to and from home and different tasks, meeting and viewings. Trips from home to work and back again are an important part of this, but only a part.
Imagine a world where a large fraction of trips involving offices, schools, retail and many other tasks are no longer needed. Many of the remaining trips would be quicker because of reduced congestion. Less danger, less cost, less noisy vehicles and a world where walking is pleasant again.
… and that’s just the beginning
Why oh why didn’t I take the blue pill?
It is a consistent feature of new, broadly applicable technologies that they throw up applications no one thought of. Quite likely the most important applications of VR are yet to be thought of. After all, who would have predicted that the invention of the laser would eliminate the need for price tags, or that wood pulp based writing paper would lead to a more pleasant experience in the bathroom?
Sadly some people really will use VR to live degenerate, fantasy lives. Natural selection will do its usual work in reducing such problems over time along with drug use, homosexuality, contraception, abortion, low birth rates and other false trails fostered by the modern world. So just relax and get ready for a whole new world of opportunity.
Read More: 5 Things The Corporate World Taught Me
6. Imagine Governments and elites forcing VR on all people to control “radical thought extremists”, who dare to think differently from the way they want them to.
7. Imagine the “thought police” monitoring everyone’s thoughts and killing anyone who refuses to comply with the rule of “law”, as they are deemed a threat to “society”.
8. Imagine a whole “city” of such people, all connected into a “Matrix”, an artificial existence where the ultimate control all lies in the hands of the elites and everyone thinks in the exact same way, with a hive-like mentality.
9. …
10. …
11. …
WisdomSeeker, why so cynical? Do you want to live in a world full of thought criminals? Seriously, next time you walk the street with your kids, do you want some stranger to think about killing you and raping them? Do you want to live in an unsafe world where death and evil thoughts linger behind every house corner and in every book? You can not seriously want to be against abolishing of evil thoughts. And do not even dare to question the absolute definition of evil. It is Satan. It is god-ordained and precise.
“Seriously, next time you walk the street with your kids, do you want some stranger to think about killing you and raping them?”
That’s exactly the kind of justification governments/elites will use to force thought control on everyone (except themselves). Also, who exactly will decide what thoughts are good/bad/etc.?
I honestly couldn’t care less what a few sick individuals think about doing to me or my children when I walk the street. However, if they try to harm me or my children, then I will exercise my God-given right to use force in self-defense.
The depraved thoughts of a few is no justification to control the thoughts of all.
There can be no light without darkness.
Good answer.
Lmao. Games are an outlet. We’d have twice as many wars without distractions. There is no good and evil only feelings and consequences. Good and evil or the dualistic nature of it is part of the propaganda machine. All you have to do to see God’s design is look around you and what is written vs what is are two totally different things. Listening to a man made word will only lead you on a man made agenda.
Yeah. Then again, distractions keep you afloat only for so long.
True.
Wars don’t happen because of no distractions. They happen over resourses, ideas, ect. Regardless of the reason wars happen out of nessessity.
Lol. While we we would all like it if wars weren’t fought for dumb reasons, but many of them are. Just go Google dumbest wars. Oh by the way saying things like that without at least a quick Google search to fact check yourself makes you look pretty dumb. Should try reading about history a little before talking about it.
Having “bad thoughts” is just a by product of the way evolution has forged our brains. The ability to think abstract thoughts and imagine different scenarios (in order to avoid the less desirable or dangerous ones) is really what makes humans stand out among the animals afterall.
Everything can be hacked. VR is no different. There will be a way escape from such a dystopia. And if by some chance there isn’t, smart people will prefer to stay away from such technology. And dumb people… well, for them it doesn’t matter anyway.
Imagine the tingling sensation your face will have when I teabag it in fps.
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It will do what the smartphone has already done, only a hundred times worse.
I do not think anything remarkable will happen until we have these things as iris overlays.
Darpa is already working on that for soldiers – I actually read that somewhere this morning on the MSN news. Don’t have a link though as it was on my phone
We still have soldiers? Thought they replaced them with drones operated by office workers.
It’ll be like playing a video game, having your health and vitals showcased and being to see who’s calling you. Iris overlays could also make tech like the hololens viable.
Haha. You know, if you need an overlay to be informed about your vitals, you are likely too fucked up to fight anyway.
practitioners of game will need to approach girls within their hermetically sealed virtual reality lives…..oh no change there then I guess
Absolutely…..When she doesn’t get attention in the real world, she’ll switch to a VR which would play hot guys giving her the attention and calling her beautiful. This will replace the “likes” for the next generation of Facebook degenerates.
Sign me up for the degenerate fantasy life.
The beginning of collective consciousness, which means the end of individual consciousness, which means the end of human consciousness.
How someone can look forward to this, is beyond me.
It would probably also involve the end of human language as we know it. We are already perhaps moving towards less conscious communication, a greater focus on imagery, signs and symbols (not all of them masonic in nature hopefully) and these work at a different level to fully articulated written / spoken language. Perhaps the attack on being able to articulate certain types of things clearly (as with PC, hate-speech etc) is accompanied by a greater focus on lower level symbolic communication. I think what I’m trying to say is that the more we move towards such a collective consciousness the more we will be moving towards a collective unconscious: a dreamscape from which there will be no waking up from
Here we go again with the Technological Fix myth, meme, fable, ignorance. There is a VAST difference between, education, intelligence, reason, knowledge, technical training, schooling, intuition, pedagogy, wisdom, cleverness, sagacity, illumination, discernment, perspicacity, perception and understanding. Many who post here are quite intelligent but lack understanding of the limits of reason.
“In the midst of increasing mechanization and technological organization, propaganda is simply the means used to prevent these things from being felt as too oppressive and to persuade man to submit with good grace. When man will be fully adapted to this technological society, when he will end by obeying with enthusiasm, convinced of the excellence of what he is forced to do, the constraint of the organization will no longer be felt by him; the truth is, it will no longer be a constraint, and the police will have nothing to do. The civic and technological good will and the enthusiasm for the right social myths-both created by propaganda-will finally have solved the problem of man.” ~ Propaganda: The Formation of Mens Attitudes
Many optimists believe that technology can transform society, whether it’s the internet or the latest phone. But as Tom Chatfield argues in his final column for BBC Future, the truth about our relationship with technology is far more interesting.
Lecturing in late 1968, the American sociologist Harvey Sacks addressed one of the central failures of technocratic dreams. We have always hoped, Sacks argued, that “if only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine the world will be transformed.” Instead, though, even our best and brightest devices must be accommodated within existing practices and assumptions in a “world that has whatever organisation it already has.”
As an example, Sacks considered the telephone. Introduced into American homes during the last quarter of the 19th Century, instantaneous conversation across hundreds or even thousands of miles seemed close to a miracle. For Scientific American, editorializing in 1880, this heralded “nothing less than a new organization of society – a state of things in which every individual, however secluded, will have at call every other individual in the community, to the saving of no end of social and business complications…”
Yet the story that unfolded was not so much “a new organization of society” as the pouring of existing human behaviour into fresh moulds: our goodness, hope and charity; our greed, pride and lust. New technology didn’t bring an overnight revolution. Instead, there was strenuous effort to fit novelty into existing norms.
The most ferocious early debates around the telephone, for example, concerned not social revolution, but decency and deception. What did access to unseen interlocutors imply for the sanctity of the home – or for gullible or corruptible members of the household, such as women or servants? Was it disgraceful to chat while improperly dressed? Such were the daily concerns of 19th-century telephonics, matched by phone companies’ attempts to assure subscribers of their propriety.
As Sacks also put it, each new object is above all “the occasion for seeing again what we can see anywhere” – and perhaps the best aim for any writing about technology is to treat novelty as not as an end, but as an opportunity to re-scrutinize ourselves.
I’ve been writing this fortnightly column since the start of 2012, and in the last two years have watched new devices and services become part of similar negotiations. By any measure, ours is an age preoccupied with novelty. Too often, though, it offers a road not to insight, but to a startling blindness about our own norms and assumptions.
Take the litany of numbers within which every commentary on modern tech is couched. Come the end of 2014, there will be more mobile phones in the world than people. We have moved from the launch of modern tablet computing in mid-2011 to tablets likely accounting for over half the global market in personal computers in 2014. Ninety per cent of the world’s data was created in the last two years. Today’s phones are more powerful than yesterday’s supercomputers. Today’s software is better than us at everything from chess to quiz shows. And so on.
Singularity myth
It’s a story in which both machines and their capabilities increase for ever, dragging us along for the exponential ride. Perhaps the defining geek myth of our age, The Singularity, anticipates a future in which machines cross an event horizon beyond which their intellects exceed our own. And while most people remain untouched by such faith, the apocalyptic eagerness it embodies is all too familiar. Surely it’s only a matter of time – the theory goes – before we finally escape, augment or otherwise overcome our natures and emerge into some new phase of the human story.
Or not. Because – while technological and scientific progress is indeed an astonishing thing – its relationship with human progress is more aspiration than established fact. Whether we like it or not, acceleration cannot continue indefinitely. We may long to escape flesh and history, but the selves we are busy reinventing come equipped with the same old gamut of beauties, perversities and all-too-human failings. In time, our dreams of technology departing mere actuality – and taking us along for the ride – will come to seem as quaint as Victorian gentlemen donning evening dress to make a phonecall.
This is one reason why, over the last two years, I’ve devoted a fair share of columns to the friction between the stories we tell about tech and its actual unfolding in our lives. I love exploring the tensions between digital tools and analogue selves – not because technology is to be dismissed or deplored, but because it remains as mired in history, politics and human frailty as everything else we touch.
On which note: what do you think is most ripe for abandonment around technology today? Which habit will come to be seen by future generations as quaint – our equivalent of putting on bow ties for telephones?
You gotta wonder what all that transformation of society is about. Life is not so horrible. What exactly do you want to ‘transform’? Oh, the pains of walking to school by foot. A tragedy of humankind.
A very interesting counterpoint. Technological advances are often overstated. While many can’t imagine a life without their smartphone, even the basic phone itself, while helpful and certainly valuable, doesn’t *fundamentally* change much for me. It just allows me to get things done faster. A lot faster. But I can imagine what things would be like without a telephone. It would be pretty much how things are now, except conversations would all take place face to face.
There would be less silly chit chat and banter. Fine by me. Long distance relationships would have to take place through mail. Which sounds like a dealkiller. But perhaps that would strengthen them? My work tasks would take longer. And life would be slower.
I’m not a luddite, and I do value living in an efficient era and look forward to the further advances VR will bring. But I can also shut it all off, and I can live without any of it, and often do for short periods (ie camping trips, or just when I shut off my phone completely for a couple of days).
The one girl I fucked, I fucked her after a year of literally sending letters written by hand. I must say I quite enjoyed that – although I could not be arsed to do that with a girl these days. Still, there is something cool about it, to expect handwritten shit in your mail.
You can never abandon offices. They need REAL paper to be signed, for it to be official. You can not just send around virtual letters … impossible.
What about electronic signature? I’ve heard it’s getting popular.
I was joking, man. They will always find reasons to employ all of their lazy state monkeys.
Yes, they will, especially when everything becomes numbers in a computer – easier to manipulate and counterfeit.
The SMV of all women around the world will drop drastically, because most men will go “herbivore”. Why would men put effort into attaining a bitchy 6 or 7, when they can have women beyond the scale with just a few clicks? Why would they put effort to go to a difficult work, when they could just put this shit around their head and suddenly be at a tropical beach – a thing that would cost thousands of dollars?
All that, of course, is good for everyone who would prefer to stay in the real world. We will be a rare commodity, and we will be sought out by women and employers. So look forward to that.
You’re already seeing this phenomenon in Japan with the “Grass-eating men.”
Hesse, you sound like one who would cower in the face of death. This is just another part of the “elites” grand scheme. I also wish people would stop calling them that, for they only have their position by clever manipulation of the past two and a half centuries and by extreme debaucheries forced on people. Their kind won’t last, and as they try to bring humanity closer and closer to forced sterility they are touching more and more boundaries of the human condition that just won’t go down without a fight. Birth, death, rebirth, these are all human things. Their technocratic demonocracy is what the future holds, and for those of you who want to partake in this, you’re already lost to the human race.
The luddites had a point, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them come back in the face of this disgusting hive mind device.
Not so sure about VR schools. A VR teacher, basically a video character, teaches kids with a preprogrammed agenda. No opposing thoughts or creativity.
Schools now are brainwashing institutions, but once you use a video character as teacher, that teacher is not capable of original thought.
Never thought about that way, VR schools will be perfect indoctrination tools.
You could learn new skills like flying a plane with VR just like flight simulators today, but it can’t replace 100% real life situations. Simulators are preprogrammed with an expected outcome. Real life situations has unexpected outcomes. Your actions/reactions affect the outcomes.
Unlikely any of these predictions will come true: they’re too rational and thought-out.
Human beings are social creatures. A “virtual society” cannot succeed. As others have said, there will always be a way out, and large numbers of people will take it.
I have little doubt that starting a few years after VR becomes widespread (if indeed it does, not a foregone conclusion that it will) all kinds of studies will start to sound an alarm about its negative effects.
as long as it requires for something to be attached to your head, it won’t be widespread or practical. it will always remain a niche device for games and entertainment.
there’s nothing else to imagine.
My thoughts:
#3: I don’t think the entertainment aspect of VR will really take off until you can get full sensory input somehow to the entire body. VR gives you just the visual, so it would be like a more immersive movie.
#4: There’s only so far you can carry a simulation, because a simulation assumes you have accounted for all variables and contingencies. Without getting into the details of what I do for a living, they have thought of ‘testing’ new materials under various stressful conditions using computer simulations to save money on running the actual tests. Like Rickover said: all models are wrong, and some are useful.
Is it still bad if I switch between useful learning and degenerate fantasy on alternate days?
Everybody has an off day now and then.
There’s one problem with it all, sterility, the close cousin to euthanasia. Detached from the real world flux, participants in vr go deeper as their bodies wither and become useless. The need to eat, bathe, shave all fall to the wayside. Filthy, hairy smelly neglected bodies strapped to goggles and sensory nodes bring an eery quiet to the cities. The diet of the computer terminal junkie we see with their pile of trash strewn about their diabetic feet under the desk. Heaps of hot pocket and candy bar wrappers amongst the spent colostomy bags are out of sight of the goggles as the fantasy mind interfaces with the cyber world commanding spaceships and screwing animals just for fun. How low can the ‘free mind’ go when the body wastes. Then there comes a point when an offer is made. Turn in your physical body for immortality in cyber space. They wheel your emaciated form, jughead and all into the cyber sieve where your brain is downloaded, chunk by chunk into the cloud and your leftover comatose body is then thrown into a meat grinder.
Wow, that’s one dystopian picture you depict. The problem with virtual reality is that it negates the whole reason to live in a body in the first place, does it not. There’s no challenges or difficulties either, everything from the most outlandish sexual fantasies to blowing people apart in a mock up city will be provided in a ” moral value free” zone inside a head that will be no longer your own. Wow, it sounds like a wonderful way to liquidate both your body, mind and soul with one stone!
I’ve actually had this idea for awhile. It is a dystopic vision for sure. The first notion of this was actually from an old Coast to Coast am show from the late 90’s or early 00’s. I can’t find the transcript off hand but I believe it was a remote viewing show with Ed Dames, Joe McGonagle or perhaps psychadellic traveller Terence Mckenna. I’ll search it. In the interview a vision was seen 20 or so years into the future when mind and brain can be downloaded ‘chunk by chunk’ into electronic form free of the physical body. A ‘viewer’ saw an ”attractive lady in a blue dress saying ”2025, kill me now””. Presumably she was then fed into the processor. So the moral is – If anyone promises you immortality for your life or body, DON’T DO IT. It’s a trick. You may have a buddy that goes off to a lab and gets zapped into cyber form, but the soul doesn’t transfer. There remains only a faux xerox copy of their brain animated electronically. It’s not really them. Your buddy continues conversing over the ‘web’ and claims to be able to soar in cyberspace for eternity, but it’s a trick and it’s not really him. Don’t go there. Out the meat grinder comes only MANBURGER. Yikes.
That’s some moral alright. It’s interesting that over the years this theme has been depicted in books and movies, like Logan’s Run, and the Matrix movies of course. How people are essentially sold a picture of an ideal reality where they must give up their human body to enter this realm. However, like the old tale about the Devil, we end up surrendering our souls for a new type of immortal, but soulless bodily perfection.
I remember reading Terence McKenna’s Invisible Landscape about 10 years ago. It was interesting work, but, ultimately he tried too hard to apply a semi-rational theoretical framework to his experiences that he felt had “global” ramifications for the planet which I thought diminished his writings somewhat.
The question of the soul is deep and enduring enigma and it comes back to your remark about your buddy who talks with you after his upload, but, even if you can see and converse with him once more, you’d intuitively feel that something wasn’t right. It’s similar to the Body Snatchers movie when the spouses of the replaced replicates don’t understand them anymore, even though they look, sound and do the same things as before. This, I suppose is what we intuitively feel when we talk about someone’s soul or essential essence that can’t be simulated through virtual reality.
Well put. Here’s a nice visual of the intermediary stage:
How did you get access to my appartment:)
………………..
He’s a bit scary. This is what the magic helmet will do to us?
You guys should look into Georeferencing as well.
The ability for satellites to track your mobile’s immediate position will get to the point of within a few centimeters in a few years.
There are new augmented reality devices that are coming onto the market as well.
I’m personally betting on the fact that digital technology and applications will explode in the next few years.
Old news really! Police and secret services can even turn your phone on even if its switched off.
Well that’s scary.
I guess I was wondering if there is a way to combine VR with Georeferencing (if it were accurate enough) for some kind of new application.
Combining the two in what way exactly? Once you put your VR goggles you might want to stay put! lol.
Maybe google maps street view and VR would work wonders, but who knows. I suspect Google’s map service is part of the VR and the technology is lagging behind. You could create tours for certain locations i,e,Everest mountains for people to experience.
P.S. If you’re using this for one of your projects then I want a share of the profits. 21.7 % would be fine by me.
lol
Streetview + VR makes sense.
There is also talk about the idea of “virtual real estate”. If your installation is specific to a specific place, other people gotta buy that real estate off of you… even though it’s not really real.
I’m excited about all this weird new shit.
You could combine Second Life with VR. I heard that you could make good money on that game. People spend actual money to play the game.
“Virtual Real Estate”?? C’mon bro, that would only work on very stupid people with no knowledge of property.
they can watch/listen you through the more modern TVs even when they’re off.
Yeah. This was what I got from a “military” guy a few years back. The metal used in certain items actually blocks some signals from spotting you. The real reason flat screens went in vogue was to legally monitor everyone. And smart phones are the same. Old model flip phones were essentially spy proof.
Had one or two fun examples of this when my old smart television turned on on its own.
Are you serious or making fun of my statement?
I am serious, unfortunately.
Had one or two fun examples of this when my old smart television turned on on its own.
the fuck
I know this technology is what you really are waiting for.
All very noble plans for VR, but if we’ve learned one thing, it’s that if you give people endless possibilities via technology, most of them use it to waste their lives.
We have a virtually limitless amount of information at our fingertips, for the first time in history, levelling the playing field and allowing the curious mind to roam free and learn new things until the day you die…. aaaaaaand most people use it to:
1) Read trivial shit about each other and celebrities via social media
2) Watch people fucking
3) Shoot imaginary people
VR will be used for much the same.
Exactly, the only difference is that now we will begin to see an increase in escapists and shut ins who refuse to leave the perfect virtual world.
If true, you have to ask if human beings in this generation had some type of posthumous existence after their deaths, would their idea of heaven or paradise amount to DDs list of 1-3 above?
As a digression, I remember once meeting a spiritualist who told me that when we die we do the same things and have the same desires we had when we were alive. I thought this sounded absurd at the time. What would the point of having lived in the first place then, however, I can see how this argument could be applied to the virtual reality idea in the future. Of course, there’s the hypotheses that’s plausible enough that we’re currently here experiencing a form of virtual reality while our spirit and mind watch on Sub specie aeternitatis.
Yeah well the cool thing is in the near future thought will be your controller making the full dive experience much more engaging and use similar neuropathways as reality so what you do in training will get you substantially more skilled in life then games of today
VR isn’t going to happen. There will be no brainwave input controllers or the like. Modern prosthesis still rely upon some physical input; including eye sensors for paraplegics.
That is not to say things will not change. The greater understanding of human “interfaced” is certainly upon us via big and bigger data. I’m just unsure if Sgt Pepper or the timeplace white album is a better??? Computer chop chop
white album is better.
how did that 3D TV work out so far?
I suppose Virtual Reality will have its uses and benefits like all technology but it just continues the spiral from what’s real to the virtual.
And personally, I don’t want to spend my time doing something that’s fake and made up, but I’d rather be in the moment, in the real world, talking face to face with real people who are in the same room as me.
The author is so delusional about the realities of this technology it’s eerie. In what world is opting out of real life experiences like going to school , and living in VR, and good thing? Sounds like a key ingredient for the big brother..
As long as I can have a pair of huge, realistic looking, Swedish tits dangle in my face every time I want to, i`m all for VR.
Some day VR may be the only way you’ll ever get that. Given that Sweden is being invaded by muslims, and ball-less Swedish men continue to allow it, blonde-haired beautiful Swedish women will soon be gone.
Anything that can eliminate fucking commutes, I’m in.
VR is just a new whack-off toy. Schools, offices, commuting and the vast majority of what government does is already obsolete. We don’t need them with or without VR.
The potential for the virtual workplace and telecommuting is limited because most employees are unreliable and their bosses/employers know it. It’s hard enough to keep track of employee productivity when they a water cooler down the hall and internet access at their desk.
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It only really works for what amounts to piecemeal labour that is easy to track what is being accomplished on a daily basis, and more professional types who are a bit more trustworthy or can stick to longer horizon goals that are relatively easy to measure over, say, a three month period.
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Distance education has the most potential in professional education and perhaps in colleges rather than high schools or universities. As with many employees, it could be impossible to hold a teenager’s attention in a class they don’t really want to be at with all of the distractions of their computer and living room.
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For universities, the thing is that professors spend a lot of their time – and suck up a lot of funding – doing research and publishing rather than actually teaching. There is a lot of nonsense around about students paying the full cost of their education which basically means taking the university’s total budget and dividing by the number of students. The government subsidizes something like 75% of the cost but it is doubtful if even 25% of that makes it into the classroom. Professors only lecture a few hours a week with a lot of the teaching, testing and marking duties being carried by teaching assistants – graduate students who are themselves paying tuition to be there.
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Eliminate a chunk of the costs of classroom teaching and I doubt you will see that translate into substantially lower tuition fees. Look at law schools: all you need is a room, a professor and an internet connection and yet they charge some of the highest fees around: nothing to do with cost, just whatever they can gouge out of wannabe shysters, judges and politicians based on prospective earning potential.