The Re-Emergence of Virtual Reality

Leighton Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351009300
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this short book, Evans interrogates the implications of VR's re-emergence into the media mainstream, critiquing the notion of a VR revolution by analysing the development and ownership of VR companies while also exploring the possibilities of immersion in VR and the importance of immersion in the interest and ownership of VR enterprises. He assesses how the ideologies and desires of both computer programmers and major Silicon Valley industries may influence how VR worlds are conceived and experienced by users while also exploring the mechanisms that create the immersive experience that underpins interest in the medium.

1 Introduction

I’ve just had a man swing a giant shovel at me trying to decapitate me. After about an hour of creeping around in the dark, feeling my heart beat through my chest. When it happened I screamed because I thought I was going to get hit by this maniac. Thank god nobody was watching me. The headset is covered in sweat. Could be due to the heat, but I’ll be honest—I was sweating due to being afraid of the game. That’s a genuine first.

These are the notes I made right after my own introduction to a fully integrated virtual reality experience. On the 1 June 2017, I unboxed and began using a PlayStation Virtual Reality (PSVR) headset, and the first experience I had was with Resident Evil VII. It was terrifying. Prior to that, a Google Cardboard headset had given me 360˚ video experiences and games on an iPhone, but this was a huge step up from those mobile virtual reality (VR) experiences. The feeling of an embodied video gaming experience, where I was perceptually linked to the gaze of the game character and every turn of my head was a turn of his head, was new, exciting and petrifying. I’d been playing Resident Evil games since 1998, and I’ve had the ‘jump!’ effect of being scared by a video game or film countless times. The experience of the game in VR, however, was visceral; previously, I could turn my head, close my eyes, put down the device, or turn off the screen. This time, turning the head did nothing. Closing my eyes meant opening them back up to the same scene. Turning off means an awkward removal of the headset, and the cost of the convenience of taking a breather from the game is too much when using VR. I was stuck there.¹ The idea of that there, how the there is made, how that bears the intentionality of programmers (and power dynamics of the digital economy) and what the possibility of being there means for us as users is the impetus for this book.

My reflections on Resident Evil VII in the context of this book are more than a mildly amusing anecdote. I had been waiting for that kind of experience for more than 20 years. In the early 1990s, I was a console gaming–obsessed teenager who would devour magazines like Mean Machines, CVG and ACE, which would at irregular intervals tease with the idea that VR was coming. VR was coming very soon, just round the corner and with us when 16-bit machines would be supplanted by 32-bit machines. Or 64-bit. Or 128-bit. Reading interviews with Jaron Lanier on VR and photographs of Virtuality headsets got me excited about the opportunity to exist in a virtual world—and that opportunity never happened. The Nintendo Virtual Boy never came to the UK, having shipped only 770,000 units (Snow, 2007) and ending a buzz around VR in console gaming. The technological buzz of my late teens was around the Internet and surfing the Web rather than VR headsets, and VR passed from popular consciousness. VR had a Hollywood focus in 1995, with Strange Days, Johnny Mnemonic and Hackers following on from the surprise 1992 breakout hit The Lawnmower Man, and then just stopped being part of the popular discourse. eXistenZ and The Matrix in 1999 would add philosophical contours to the story of VR, but despite the interesting existential and metaphysical questions both films raised VR remained quite invisible in popular entertainment. While The Matrix was top of the box office in 1999, Lanier’s pioneering VR company VPL Research filed for bankruptcy (Virtual Reality Society, 2017). The buzz died, as did visions of living in a VR world in the early 1990s.

Now the buzz is back, and I finally have the opportunity to experience that world that was promised and never delivered in the early 1990s. The re-emergence of VR that this book is concerned with is the re-emergence of the medium in commercial electronics and popular discourse, and the fact that I could have a VR experience like my sweaty, screaming horror at Resident Evil VII at home is an indication of a cultural milestone that the medium has passed through in the last few years. In the early 1990s, a commercial VR headset such as VPLs EyePhone headset would have cost around $10,000 (Lanier, 2017: 190). Today, a PSVR retails for under £300, with games. Powerful, PC-based platforms like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are catering for the top end of the new market; PSVR and Samsung’s Gear represent a mid-range VR market; and Google Cardboard and various other low-cost headsets represent a cheaper, smartphone–powered market. In May 2018, the Oculus Go and Lenovo Mirage Solo arrived, retailing for $199 and $399 respectively, bringing a stand-alone, purely consumer-focused VR headset at commercial-level pricing to the public. VR has arrived.

The development of these commercial VR technologies is enmeshed in the wider digital economy of the 2010s. In 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus VR for $2.3 billion in cash and stock options (Welch, 2014), making VR integrated with the biggest social network in the world. Nvidia (Feltham, 2018) predicts that by 2021, 50 million VR headsets will be sold. By early 2018, Sony had sold more than 2 million PSVR headsets, and while HTC and Oculus have not as yet released sales figures for their Vive and Rift headsets, Google has sold more than 10 million Cardboard headsets (Robertson, 2017) with figures unavailable for the myriad imitators of that kind of VR headset. While the market is currently small, major companies in the digital economy are establishing key positions in the VR market. Facebook own Oculus. Sony have developed a dedicated platform for its PlayStation 4 console. Samsung are developing hardware and a platform. Google are developing hardware, platforms and software for VR. The major digital media companies are staking out their hardware and software platforms as critical services in the emerging commercial market.

With a consumer market for VR, we are seeing a medium that has always promised a revolution in perspective, immersion and mediated experience become available to a mass market for the first time in a technologically suitable form. While Computer Gaming World predicted affordable VR by 1994 back in 1992 (Engler, 1992), it has taken another two decades for that prediction of affordability and commercial potential to be realised. However, the world in which the medium is now re-emerging is radically different from the world of the early 1990s. In 1992, the Mosaic Web browser for viewing graphics on the then recently invented World Wide Web had not yet been released; Windows95 was 3 years from release; it would be 12 years before the founding of Facebook. The Internet was a niche communications medium and only available through desktop computing with a dial-up modem. The early promise of VR and the interest in VR in the 1990s, when there appeared a possibility of a commercial breakthrough, were in an entirely different context from the one in which VR is emerging today. Now, billions of people around the world are connected to the Internet via personal media devices and use the Web, social media and other Internet-dependent communications technologies constantly. We are networked individuals, continually connected to the Internet. The idea that we can reside in a cyberspace made possible by a VR headset has been superseded by a reality where we have integrated cyberspace into our everyday lives, a digital media eco-structure dominated by major commercial companies.

This book critically assesses what the re-emergence of commercial VR means in the context of the current digital world, its economics, the environment and the intentions of VR development. As the title of this book suggests, the core question of the book is, “Why is VR re-emerging?” To answer this question, it is necessary to interrogate two other questions. Firstly, the promise of VR as a radical, immersive medium is only now being realised commercially. This book traces an argument that VR withdrew from and re-emerged in consumer media thanks to technological deficiencies but that its re-emergence into a new socio-technical environment questions the very possibility of VR being revolutionary. The critical question to be asked with regard to this is, “How does the emergence of a wider digital culture and economy impact on VR as a re-emerging medium?” As the discourses and imaginaries of VR make much of VR being a revolutionary medium, the dominance of the emerging commercial market in VR by the giants of the digital economy question how revolutionary the re-emergence of VR is (or can be) in practice. Secondly, the possibility of revolutionary immersion itself requires close examination. If this possibility underpins the attraction of VR, then how immersion is achieved and what such immersion could achieve become important considerations. In essence, “What might VR achieve and how in terms of immersion?” By addressing these questions, the intention of this book is to critically assess why VR is re-emerging as a medium and what that means for media users.

Immersion and Virtual Worlds—The Revolutionary Discourse of VR

The choice of the word ‘worlds’ in the preceding heading is very deliberate, and in this book it will be used to refer to two different but interlocking concepts that are critical in understanding what the re-emergence of VR into the present day world might mean for the development, use and impact of the medium. ‘World’ refers to the wider social, cultural and technological milieu in which VR is designed, developed and used. ‘World,’ in a very different sense of the word, also refers to what VR may be able to produce (eventually). Here, I refer to ‘world’ in a phenomenological sense, as the referential totality of things and other people that make sense to us and that we understand intuitively. This may appear abstract; an illustration, though, is very straightforward. When I find myself in a room with an oven, a stove top, a kettle, knives in a rack, a dishwasher, a fridge and freezer, and I’m wearing rubber gloves and doing the washing up, I know that I am in the kitchen. I don’t consciously look around to make this judgement; I know intuitively this is a kitchen based on my experiences of kitchens in the past and of my own kitchen. When I enter a room that I have never been in previously that has these objects, I know I’m in a kitchen. That kitchen might be different from mine in particular ways, but it fits with my concept of kitchen. My kitchen concept is, in a phenomenological context, a ‘world’—an existential locale that I know intuitively and without reference to questioning because the referential totality made by the objects in that room ‘tell’ me it’s a kitchen without my questioning. On a day-to-day basis, we pass through these worlds of familiarity countless times without thinking about those places, and our knowing of ‘world’ in this way is integral to our everyday understanding and functioning.

Digital media devices can be the basis for worlds (see Evans, 2015). Take my experience in Resident Evil VII; at first, I was tense and nervous as I didn’t know the game and literally spent the first hour jumping around like a bunny at every shock and scare in the game. After a few hours, I was accustomed to the game. My familiarity with the game meant fewer shocks, fewer scares (albeit some very intense ones still occurred), and my avatar in the game was moving more freely, more quickly and with greater precision than previously. At the same time, I was less consciously aware of the controller in my hand, more confident and less reflective with button presses and handling the controller. My familiarity had brought a feeling of worldhood; the tools I was using passed away from circumspection, and I was familiar with the game environment. Regular gamers will be all too familiar with this feeling, that the controller fades away, and we are completely comfortable in that world of the game, as will those of us who use a keyboard to type regularly or a smartphone to access social networking. The device fades away as it is part of the experience of the ‘world’ we are in.

The potential of VR as a medium—and this was the potential that excited people back in the 1980s and 1990s as well as today—is that this kind of worldhood, or feeling of world, can be made in a medium that is far more immersive than my video game console broadcast through an LED TV. A VR headset provides an enclosed visual field for the user; headphones cancel out the sound of the outside world; haptic devices can provide sensory feedback loops of touch, pain, heat or cold.² While immersion is a feature of many kinds of effective media—I feel immersed in a good novel, at a compelling play, in the cinema with a good film or in my video game—the potential and promise of VR were to intensify, perfect and idealise immersion because of the sensory affordances of the medium. The potential to build worlds, or the potential for a feeling of worldhood, in VR is critical when considering the potential of VR as a consumer medium. Being immersed in a VR world might just be the most intense media experience we can have—but the worlds built in VR are contextualised and shaped by the world in which VR is emerging. VR applications, systems, platforms and hardware are the products of design principles and organisations that have ideological and political character that will shape the form of the VR worlds being made. So, world in this book has a dual articulation or meaning. The emergence of consumer VR demands that we pay attention to how worlds can be made in VR and to how the wider world or context in which VR develops shapes and affects the VR worlds that we are now being encouraged to experience and inhabit.³

Whatever Happened to the VR Revolution 1.0?

I have already referred to the excitement around VR that was a feature of near and distant visions of computing in the early 1990s. Understanding why that excitement did not deliver on the vision of the technology is important in giving context to the current new wave of VR. Lister et al. (2009: 106–107) provided some pertinent thoughts on this when discussing their own comments on VR from an earlier edition of their own book on new media. They state that VR, as a medium, once had a discourse surrounding it that was every bit as absorbing and hyped as the Internet but that did not deliver on that hype and expectation like the Internet and the World Wide Web would so spectacularly from the mid-1990s. The authors note that “the enthusiasm for VR was part of the euphoric techno-utopian expectations of the period, and the heady mix of the computer counter-culture and neo-liberal Silicon Valley entrepreneurship—a period that was brought to a fairly abrupt end by the dotcom bust of 2000” (2009: 106). The zeitgeist of the 1980s and 1990s computational and digital development will be discussed in Chapter 2 on the history of VR but it is worth unpicking some of the points that Lister et al. make here to set the context for this book. The dotcom bust of 2000 may well have played a role in the decrease in commercial interest in VR, as VR was a capital-intensive technology that had (despite more than a decade and a half of hype and investment) yet to make a major inroad into the commercial electronics market.

Of more importance, though, is an additional point made by Lister et al. through a quote from Stephen Ellis, lead researcher in the Advanced Displays and Spatial Perception Lab at NASA, who stated that “the technology of the 1980s was not mature enough” (Lister et al., 2009: 106). The early period of VR was characterised by a vision that was far ahead of the technological possibilities of the time. In the late 2010s, the technology has begun (but not yet reached or surpassed) the vision of VR from the 1980s. This lack of fit, which will be referred to as a ‘technological lag’ in this book, is far more salient in the delay in the emergence of VR in the commercial electronics and entertainment space. Technological lag is a referent to cultural lag (Woodard, 1934: 388), the phenomenon that culture takes time to catch up with technological innovations and that social problems and conflicts are caused by this lag. With technological lag, technology has had to catch up with the vision of the medium, causing a gap between the idealism of the original wave of VR and the realities and structures of the digital economy in the present day. The ‘euphoric techno-utopianism’ of the 1980s and 1990s required technological developments that afforded (Gibson, [1979] 2015) the possibility of realising those visions. While those technological affordances are either now with us or on the way, the contention in this book is that the vision itself may have been swamped by the heady mix of the computer counterculture and neo-liberal Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, or Californian Ideology (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996). The possibility of a cyberspace where people can interact, experience new approaches to sensation, perception and embodiment and have a radically different world from the everyday world contrasts with technologies dominated by companies whose primary business model is the production, aggregation and selling of personal data for profit.

That euphoric techno-utopianism of the discourses around 1990s VR was a reflection of the implicit and explicit revolutionary nature of VR as radically immersive and intimate. However, the revolutionary nature of VR as a medium in itself is questionable. The VR revolution and the potential of VR to be a new medium were predicated on the possibility of being in another world. Sirius (2007) described that notion as:

These 3D worlds would be accessed through head-mounted displays. The idea was to put the user literally inside computer-created worlds, where she could move around and see and hear the goings on in a fully dimensional alternative reality and have the sensation of being in another world. The eyes were the primary organs of entrance into these other worlds, although touch, motion and sound were all also involved.⁴

This is still the potential of VR today, and in this potential the claims of a revolutionary medium lie—a fully alternative, computer-generated reality that we can be fully immersed within. However, the presence of major digital media companies in the VR space, producing platforms, application and hardware, suggests that the potential for a revolutionary form of immersive experience needs to be considered in the context of digital media economics, politics, social attitudes and ideologies. Therefore, this book critiques the notion of a VR revolution by analysing the development and ownership of VR companies while also exploring the possibilities of immersion in VR and the importance of immersion in the interest and ownership of VR enterprises. This book will build an argument that explores critically why these major developers and companies want to dominate a media form that builds computer-generated worlds that are intended for people to dwell in. The promise of immersion and a revolutionary media experience is intimately linked to the aims, objectives and ideologies of the companies that are seeking to dominate the VR hardware, software and platform markets. This argument therefore critically assesses how the ideologies and desires of both computer programmers and major Silicon Valley industries currently influence, and will influence in the future, how these worlds are conceived and experienced by users while also exploring the mechanisms that create the immersive experience that underpins interest in the medium.

This is the inaugural book in the Routledge Focus on Digital Culture series, and VR is a digital medium that needs to be understood in that context of digital culture. The development of VR since the 1960s did not take place in a vacuum from the rest of computational technology or digital cultures; VR develops as part of a wider technological and cultural frame, and VR as a medium reflects, embodies and problematizes cultural issues. Palmer Luckey invented the Oculus Rift, but he’s also a prominent Donald Trump supporter known for his funding of ‘shitposting’⁵ during the ...