Why Virtual Reality (VR) Feels Real

These Tricks Make Virtual Reality Feel Real (+Video)

Realistic digital spaces need delusions as much as they need detail.

Tom Vanderbilt | January 7, 2016

I am standing a few feet away from a conference table, about to test something called a “Holojam.” It is made of head-mounted displays, motion capture cameras and many lines of code. Affixed to the edges of the table, as well as to my hands and ankles, are little plastic balls, which are used to track things in the virtual environment. Like QR codes, they help the software interpret the table as a table.
Ken Perlin, who directs the Media Research Lab at New York University, describes it to me as the “first community-created collaborative 4-D spacetime sculpture.” Then he flips the switch. The space I am standing in is a kind of forest clearing at night, with a bright moon illuminating tall trees.

The recognition that cyberspace is a fiction -- a narrative that creates a coherence it would like to imagine "really" exists -- is crucial to any theoretically sophisticated critique of the limitations of this consensual hallucination and the discontents it imperfectly masks. In this groundbreaking volume Robert Markley and his co-authors set out to discover why "cyberspace provokes often-rapturous rhetoric but resists critical analysis." Taking a variety of approaches, the authors explore the ways in which virtual realities conserve and incorporate rather than overthrow the assumptions and values of a traditional, logocentric humanism: the Platonist division of the world into the physical and metaphysical in which ideal forms are valued over material content. Cyberspace, David Porush suggests, represents not a break with our metaphysical past but an extension of its basic theistic postulates. Source: http://www.amazon.com/Virtual-Realities-Discontents-Robert-Markley/dp/0801852269

<more at http://nautil.us/issue/32/space/these-tricks-make-virtual-reality-feel-real; related links: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/543291/get-a-virtual-reality-punch-feel-real-impact/ (Get a Virtual-Reality Punch, Feel Real Impact. Researchers in Germany have developed technology for an armband that lets you feel impact from virtual interactions. November 11, 2015) and http://www.scienceclarified.com/scitech/Virtual-Reality/Which-World-Is-Real-The-Future-of-Virtual-Reality.html (Chapter 6 
Which World Is Real? The Future of Virtual Reality.)>