VR is Hacking Perception

All the hardware is just a distraction

My dad has always been a coveter of gadgetry, and his love for hardware transferred to me early. As a pre-schooler, I was obsessed with the monochrome-screen IBM XT 286 computer my parents used almost exclusively for word processing. When it came time to check spelling on a document, I would gleefully hop over to flip the protective arm and swap out 5.25" floppy disks to load the spell checker.

It may not surprise you then to know that I’m excited about VR. For the obsessive few with deep pockets, right now the hardware is a lot of fun: the level of customization and spec-obsessing over everything from GPUs to disk buses necessary to build a machine capable of running a VR headset is so much richer than anything the smartphone revolution had to offer.

I love consumption-friendly electronics, but for everyone else, VR right now is a pile of electronic face squids. And a face squid is hardly a revolution.

Hardware is not what’s exciting about VR, and it’s certainly not what is going to bring VR beyond the circuitheads like me.

My prized possession circa second grade, the Apple IIc Plus, came with a curious book along its drier manuals, a beginner’s guide to programming. Reading A Touch of Applesoft Basic was like discovering a secret door to the control room behind my computer screen, a room far vaster and with far more powerful machinery than I had ever imagined.

When you learn to program, you discover that your Apple isn’t really magical; it’s just following the instructions you give it. When you program your computer, you get to create your own magic.

Learning to write software for my computer revealed that what was on the screen was not immutable and factual, but something I could directly change. When I came to the chapter on graphics—where you call 5 x 10mm blocks pixels—I was ecstatic: Drawing a box in bright neon green (my favorite color) felt like controlling reality.

This time around, the possibilities that come from programming are an order of magnitude greater. With VR, not just the screen can be hacked, but perception itself.

So much ink is currently spilled on whether Virtual Reality or Augmented Reality will triumph. The key word for the hacker is the same in both: reality.

Perhaps this is naïveté, or the overly optimistic yearning of those of us raised on Virtual Light and Johnny Mnemonic and eXistenZ, but the first time I fiddled with Unreal and placed a textured blob in virtual space, in front of my actual eyes, was as mind-bending as that first pixel I plotted twenty years ago.

While writers fumble around with Gibson-esque terms like “synthetic reality” that suggest B-movie sci-fi as much as legitimately world-changing technology, and we all fumble around with our expensive face squids, so many hackers have tried VR and felt the same electric jolt of possibility that I did.

The software is what will not only make these devices and terms useful, but will actually sell them.

Two of the greatest software makers of all time, Google and Facebook, are unsurprisingly investing heavily in VR. As with any paradigm shift, it’s not clear that their expertise and organizations will capably produce the winners in this new realm. History isn’t on the side of the incumbents here.

If I were running one of the groups working in VR out there right now, I wouldn’t obsess with making the perfect headset. Instead, I’d set out to amplify and enable that undeniable feeling of raw, reality-molding possibility that so many programmers have felt in playing with this new paradigm.

To capture the attention of the software makers, we’re going to need whole new categories of tools. The clunky, large-organization-biased gaming platform tools for creating experiences don’t suit this brave new world at all. And nobody has yet even built the most basic distribution tools to seamlessly get an experience into that headset! These are problems a few leaders should jump in and solve quickly. Their reward will be a flood of eager builders, ready to do way more than put pixels on a screen.

Forget the hardware. As soon as someone builds for us programers, inspires us, gives them a clear path to bringing experiences to the end user, VR will go mainstream in a flash.