Bridging People Together: The Power of Virtual Reality
An Ideal (Virtual) World
The film Ready Player One paints the picture of a world where people can be whoever they want to be and do whatever they want to do, all from the comfort of their rooms. All they have to do is slip on a headset and a pair of gloves to enter their virtual reality.
There are millions of players populating the virtual world of OASIS, and they’re all free to choose which of the countless planets that are inside it to immerse themselves into. These can range from a retro-styled arcade planet to a gritty battle to the death with anyone and everyone on it. This opens up the interactions players can have — and you wouldn’t even truly know who you’re doing it with.
This kind of experience can bring people together no matter the difference between them or the distance, connecting people on a whole other level than what we’re used to having. It won’t just be walls of text they see anymore, and it would feel much closer to being with them in person.
Does it sound too far out to be believable? I’d think so, but with how much Virtual Reality has been becoming more popular and advancing lately, I’m starting to think twice.
What We Do Have
Virtual Reality is still far from being mainstream, but it has been becoming more prevalent with multiplayer games such as AltspaceVR and VRChat on the rise for the past few months.
In VRChat, players are represented by an avatar that can perform gestures, emote and connect with other players online. Using a VR Headset and some controllers, they can join one another in activities available through updates and user-generated content, such as bowling, Kart Racing, or even just screwing around in a room.
Sound familiar? That’s because it sounds just like what players would do in the OASIS. Well, not exactly. There’s not as much stuff to do in VRChat nor as much immersion than there is in the OASIS, but the interaction is still there.
Having been released for free as a part of Steam’s Early Access Program back in February 2017, it started to get a lot of attention by December of the same year from the attention Twitch and Youtube content creators were giving to it. By January 2018, the average amount of players in VRChat increased to 9,223.4 and average amount of viewers on Twitch peaked at 6,900. In this short amount of time, players were quick to form a large online community where people have come to depend on one another.
While attention surrounding the game has since then dwindled, there’s still a pretty big player base that keeps on playing to this day. Second Life, a similar but much older game, launched all the way back in 2003. Despite this, it still manages to make millions of dollars in revenue in recent years, showing that a dedicated player base can keep games like these alive.
What This Means
The surge in popularity of VRChat brought some much needed attention to Virtual Reality and what it can do for a community. Some players find the platform a much needed alternative for social interaction, finding it easier to come out of their shells inside the virtual chat room than in real life.
From there, they build their confidence through their experiences in VRChat to be able to perform better socially in person, bridging the gap between their virtual and real interactions.
Other players also see VRChat as a place where they can find good company easier than trying to find it in real life. For instance, a video clip posted online by a Twitch streamer named Syrmor in which a middle school student, going by the name sethbriggs2004, opens up to him about the current state of his real life. The student admits that although it feels difficult to talk to people in real life, he feels more welcome in VRChat. The interaction as a whole garners a genuine, positive reaction from the stream’s audience, and at the end, Syrmor replies to sethbriggs2004 in kind.
Players even stopped and dropped everything when it looked like somebody was having a seizure in VR. They started to back off to give him some space, constantly checked if he was OK and shooing away avatars with flashing colors in case it affected the player.
The virtual chat room is filled with interactions like these, wherein people are able to act much bolder than they would in a normal real life setting. A study by Ina Blau and Avner Caspi shows that the anonymity that the game provides to the players through the avatars they create decreases the fear of criticism from others, resulting in players participating in the activity more and taking more risks. This is a case of the “online disinhibition effect”, coined by psychologist John Suler back in 1993.
This increase in social activity together with the technological advancements of Virtual Reality, it can be seen that Virtual Reality allows us to interact with other people online in more intimate ways that current social media cannot, coming closer and closer to actual human interaction. Except that we have sort of have superpowers and you can do it as Papa Smurf.
Room For Some Improvement
The fact that players can hide behind an avatar can go both ways, however. Unfortunately, people have been choosing to be uncivil, insensitive jerks as soon as they could hide behind a mask of anonymity, like on websites such as 4chan.
Back in 2016, reporter Taylor Lorenz wrote about her sexual harassment on AltspaceVR, saying users had started harassing her as soon as she entered the welcome room. Another user enters a VRChat room as a racist avatar, flashing images of gore on-stage to an audience before getting kicked out.
There have been attempts at using Virtual Reality to teach others about empathy to reduce cases such as those, like using the platform to teach the community about the dangers law enforcers face through simulations. There are also films that make use of VR to put the viewer in the shoes of refugees and let them see different perspectives of a situation.
Moderators also make sure that these sorts of negative experiences don’t happen often, removing the trolls of the virtual space through reporting and banning. There are also other approaches to dealing with these users, such as muting and blocking them when possible.
Moving Forward
With all its strengths and flaws, Virtual Reality is still a huge opportunity for people to create really great things and make big impacts. As of now, it’s still pretty new and has a lot of untapped potential.
There’s a lot of technological limitations that stop us from reaching the same level of virtual realism and immersion as the OASIS or The Matrix, but with stuff like eye trackers and controllers with rumbles that can simulate the feeling of a glass of water coming out in recent times, we can already see where we’ll go in a few more generations.
