Suppose that I want to convey to you what it’s like to walk a foggy trail in Big Sur.
But if we take “rich” to mean “apt for communicating personal experience” – the sense of the word that Zuckerberg seems to have in mind – the putative trajectory of increasing richness away from text and towards VR starts to look less clear. Photographs and videos might well pack in more information per unit area, or time, than text does. On one reading, “rich” just means something like “informationally dense”. Is Zuckerberg correct in saying that text-based communications are less “rich” than video-based or 3D ones – and that VR would really get us “closer and closer” to capturing “natural experience”? And what does he mean by “rich”, anyway?
“But that’s not the end, right? I mean, it’s like this indefinite continuum of getting closer and closer to being able to capture what a person’s natural experience and thought is, and just being able to immediately capture that and design it however you want and share it with whomever you want.” Enlisting the virtual as a way of navigating and coping with the real has long been an established part of human life “Photos are richer than text video, much richer than photos,” he explains. The technical challenges facing VR are formidable, as are the scientific ones: there are still gaping holes in our knowledge about how perception works, which have to be plugged before the tech becomes truly immersive (or at the very least, stops making us feel seasick).īut what about the philosophical challenges? What does it mean to “share experiences”? And if that’s what VR is trying to facilitate, is a “scientific understanding” of experience really the only thing developers need? How ‘rich’ is virtual reality?įor Zuckerberg, video has ushered in a “golden age” of online communication.
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