Black and white expectations

I remember being a kid and asking my mum if she could always see in colour or if it had been invented and somehow magicked into life along with colour TV. I’d always known colour, but had she? As it turns out: yes.

In wondering aloud yesterday (while of course positing no suggestions) how having the means of video production effortlessly available at their fingertips would change how video was used by the generation coming up, I also started wondering (to myself) how not knowing a life without virtual reality would impact how they saw real life. Would calling it “real life” even make sense, or would it engender the same expression I currently give people when they insist on awkwardly attaching “e” to “commerce”, as if the distinction was still somehow meaningful?

VR is going to impact games (and porn of course) first — video games have always been out in front of the general populace, and sometime later the business world will catch up. That catch up was what I was wondering about. Despite this age of video conferencing, in business we still talk about how important it is to get face time, to get in the room with those we do business with.

Will that remain? Probably initially. But as the fidelity improves, maybe? Perhaps while still wearing a headset. What about when that is no longer needed, when I can look to my left or right and see people as I would in the real world (there’s that term again)? The infrastructure to do that is probably a couple decades away, but the technical ability to do it is an eventual certainty.

My gut says it will still be important to look someone in the eye, shake their actual hand. But I of course have never known anything different. When the approximation of it is almost identical, what choices will we make?

#nowplaying Lights Low — RKCP