VRAR & Philosophy — Simulate the Reality or create new Reality?
As a VRAR designer for five years, I have designed and developed a lot of exciting VR AR projects — VR training for factory workers, VR and AR drawing, AR instruments, and so on. Most of those projects, we put a lot of effort into simulating the real world. Especially VR, Photorealistic is not enough. People’s default thinking is only when other senses — haptic, sound, and smell co-exists in the same way they are in the Real-world; at that time, Virtual Realit counts Reality. The more realistic, the better.
But I started to question:
- Is such level of immersion should become the ultimate goal for all VR AR designers?
- And what does “Reality” really mean for us?
What does “Reality” really mean for us?
We perceive the world we are living in as real because of its visibility, tangibility, hearablity, and smellability (this word doesn’t exist). Every time we interact with the world, we have a default anticipation pattern in mind, which is generated from our past experiences and body characteristics. If signals I got from the outside world are all consistent with the pattern. Most of the time, we will conclude that we are in the real world now.
A lot of people think VR is fake because what we experience in VR now is inconsistent with the real-world sensory pattern stored in the brain.
But here comes the problem. Using the same logic here, if you put a newborn baby in the VR world and raise him. Is it possible that this baby will construct a new perceptual sensation mechanism and think that VR is the real world? When he was 18 years old, he took off his helmet, and he felt that our world was virtual because what he experiences in our real world is inconsistent with his world. Just like the movie: The Truman Show.
Then, following this logic. I had another thought experiment.
Let say our world is like a game (Minecraft lol). “The creator” first used elements of gold, wood, water, fire, and soil, put them into a program, and generated our physical world. Then, the creator creates an algorithm that defines the world operation rules.
We, humans, are just like the data running in this world. “The creator” inputs elements of DNA and other organic ingredients into a program, which then generated our human bodies. Then put a program in the human brain, which can control our body and mind. Those algorithms in the brains drive the human body to do various “things” in this world.
The significant part is that we, as data are able to reproduce, which means that male data will find female data to produce more data with new characteristics. Newborns become the new data to train the world model?!
Now, at this stage of thinking, I start to feel more suspicious about this world. People with the knowledge of machine learning or AI will know that we train the model with a lot of data in order to make the algorithm have a better output or modify the algorithm itself to serve our lives better. There are some anticipations behind the model training.
So if the creator exists, then what are the anticipations from them to write this world algorithm. Or what’s the purpose of our beings?
Maybe our creator uses us living on the earth as a prototyping software to refine their world? 🤣
Can VR AR AI answer our being questions?
Those are fundamental questions for us that have been discussed for many years in the forms of philosophy, theology, religion, and of course, science. A similar thought experiment is brain in a vat.
The exciting part of the emerge of VR AR AI technology is that it seems to provide feasible approaches to answer those “who I am,” “where I’m from,” “where I’m going,” “why I exist” being questions.
Recently some biotechnology researchers successfully create reconfigurable organisms — organism robots. Which means we can use code to create life! And another group of researchers in AI and neuroscience found that there is a probability-based prediction mechanism in those organism robots and human brains! Okay, our mind has its algorithm!
Consider these technologies. It’s possible that if we put some virtual characters into a VR world, writing some algorithms to drive their behaviors. One day they may have the same intelligence as people and then create their civilization just like we have on the earth? Or is our current world only a node on an infinite fractal tree?
Ask the right question!
Now question back to the design for VRAR. The problem for our new generation VR AR Designer is not just about how to simulate the real world but becomes how we want human beings to perceive this new world and interact with it.
The same logic applied to the technology we created behind VRARAI. The question is not how to make the computer understand our world as well as we can, but how do we want machines to understand our world? How we design a sensory mechanism for the machine?
As a designer for any new techs, remember to ask the right questions.
Other articles are coming:
- VRAR & Philosophy
- VRAR & Design
- VRAR & Industry
