“There will always be a difference between the feeling of being somewhere and knowing authentically that one is there.”
Sub-titled “Virtual reality tempts us to abandon the real in favor of the simulated”, this article has been written by Dr. Colin Ellard and published in Psychology Today. It begins:
“With Facebook’s recent rebranding as Meta, and its announcement of heavy investment in the creation of a metaverse, tech media have been abuzz with this word. Anyone who watched (possibly with some amusement) the recent video showing Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, extolling the virtues of this new virtual realm, might suspect that there’s more smoke than there is fire here. Meta’s own description of their metaverse as ‘…a set of virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people who aren’t in the same physical space as you’ is nothing new.* After all, games like Fortnite have been around for quite a while now. What Meta is suggesting is that thanks to a nifty redesigned virtual reality (VR) headset and an online platform that they will provide, we will want to use the magic ‘presence’ of VR for more of our everyday life. Presence is a term long-used by virtual reality researchers to refer to the feeling of being ‘there,’ where ‘there’ is somewhere other than one’s physical location (Berkman & Akan, 2019). If I wear a headset that makes me feel as though I’m standing on a highwire over Niagara Falls, presence will mean that I feel the same kinds of psychological effects as if I was teetering over the Falls themselves. …”
You can read more from here.
