While this article doesn’t dive particularly deep (rather, rehashes the recent past with some omissions), it does at least beg the question – are we being thoughtful about the ramifications or are we chasing profits? I can say that we (me, our labs) spend a lot of our time and energy on the “why” – but then again we’re not a company and we don’t have to please investors. We do however have to make our funding agencies happy, and the lines begin to blur quickly.
Suffice it to say that Skip Rizzo’s work has shown that VR can be used to heal. I think the commercial industries will pretty quickly show how it can be used to make money and screw people up. Right now the focus is on “fixing” the physical reactions (primarily nausea – e.g. I’m in that 5-10% of people who just can’t do VR for very long before getting motion sickness). But the psychological and sociological ramifications are far deeper, more insidious, and the ones that the commercial sector will actively avoid talking about. Unless it will make them money. Not that I’m a cynic or anything…
This is part of why I talk about emulsional worlds and why digital and analog don’t mix into solutions.