Virtual Reality: Illusion or Evolution

You look across the valley and spot a weathered castle nestled between the mountains, feeling its strange aura and a slight breeze against your face.

You sheath your sword, the faint scraping of metal ringing in your ears.

As you begin your descent down the hill, your leather boots thump against the soft ground, and you can almost feel them rub against your bare feet. 

Although it may seem like it, this is no dream. It’s all real, within the quiet hum of a headset and the bland walls of your room.

It’s called virtual reality, and it continues to evolve, blurring the line between reality and simulation.

But is this progress toward the dawn of a new era, or simply a mere illusion of a dream.

Virtual reality has come a long way from its early beginnings in 1968. Startups are blooming across the world, all chasing the promise of immersive computing. 

With today’s technology, games no longer feel like a distant world imagined and played through a console.

They are altered worlds you step into and experience firsthand, not just watch from afar.

You can fight in the colosseum and feel the sand under your feet, you can hang out with friends in a war-crime city, fight in a chaotic, fantasy world, or even work on a group project with your collegues; at least to a point. 

Although the games might not be the most enjoyable (a personal take), VR technology has come a long way since 1968 and still has a long way to go.

From the launch of the Meta Quest 3(in late 2023) and the Apple Vision Pro (in early 2024) to the Omni One, featuring a full-body experience (released in late 2024), our time is marked by fast-paced VR development.

However, whether VR leaves a mark in the future or slowly fades into a historical footnote remains to be seen.

It seems everywhere you look in technology, we’re chasing visions once confined to science fiction.

We often turn toward these futuristic concepts for inspiration, adapting them to a more realistic and modern approach until these ideas become a part of our everyday lives. 

The video call, self-driving cars, 3D printing, and voice assistants, once the realm of fiction, are now integral to our daily lives.

Given this history of innovation, what can we expect from the future possibilities of VR?

The appearance of VR in public imagination has changed over the decades, and now we’re seeing those visions creep ever more into reality.

From Ready Player One’s fully immersive metaverse, we can expect full-body vests and complex rigs.

The released Omni One, after extensive years of work, promises such a future.

It solves the problem of omnidirectional travel with a slippery, concave surface; according to tech reviewer Linus, “a flawed solution to a problem with no perfect solution.”

While less probable, films like The Matrix and the show, Sword Art Online, warn us of a VR’s potential to spiral into a chaotic and uncontrollable future. What fate will VR choose?

Continued development of user-friendly consumer VR products, a dystopian future like in Ready Player One, or the expiration of excitement and abandonment of the technology?

The story of virtual reality didn’t start with sleek goggles and a billion-dollar company.

The first glimpse of VR was shown in 1968 as a bulky mass of metal referred to as a giant overhead cross, suspended from the ceiling and strapped to the head of the participant.

This device could only show virtual wireframes of basic shapes, which led its creator, Ivan Sutherland, to mock the people’s recognition of it as virtual reality.

Developed by Sutherland with his student Bob Sproull, with an unwieldy design and humble beginnings, The Sword of Damocles proved that science fiction could be reality.

Interest in VR by the public surged in the 1980s and 90s through films like the Lawnmower Man and arcade games, which featured virtual reality as the next frontier.

However, the tech was just not ready; it was still primitive, bulky, and motion-sickness felt all too real.

Virtual reality was only used by several institutions, such as NASA and the Air Force, with few practical applications.

Then came a long pause in VR development until 2012, when an 18-year-old named Palmer Luckey launched a Kickstarter campaign for the Oculus Rift after seeing potential in the DIY headset he developed in his garage.

The event turned VR on its head.

This simple contraption raised $2.4 million and prompted the rise of VR into reality.

Just two years later, Oculus Rift was bought by Facebook for $2.3 billion.

With VR in the hands of a billion-dollar company, virtual reality reached a boom in development, and sales skyrocketed, each year surpassing the other.

Acknowledging both the past and the present, can we glimpse at the future?

No.

We will never be able to know the future for certain, and things can change anytime in the most unpredictable ways.

Still, we can’t stop wondering what the future could bring us, something of a sci-fi universe, or a future that feels more mundane and formal, much like today.

What is for certain is that we are all confined to societal rules placed by us, that defy what is ethical and what is not.

Therefore, a dystopian future like that in Ready Player One remains improbable.

Either way, technology continues to advance at a rapid rate, making it ever harder to predict the future; now, only time may reveal what is ahead for certain.

The idea of virtual reality has certainly faced its ups and downs, with no doubt, from its first creation in 1968 as a crude, bulky device to ground-breaking innovations with the Apple Vision Pro, Quest 3, and more.

Though an unstable technology, virtual reality has progressed far more than ever imagined since it was first created.

With a pause in development and success in the 1980s and 90s, virtual reality seemed like an empty dream until 2012, when Palmer Luckey launched a Kickstarter for the Oculus Rift, changing everything in the VR game.

Since then, the development of VR has skyrocketed, with millions of sales of innovative products and services.

But will virtual reality reach a ceiling and remain, once again, a stagnant dream, or keep climbing to unimaginable heights?

One thing is for certain: our curiosity toward the idea of virtual reality will never cease to exist.

If this newsletter has sparked your curiosity about emerging technologies in the world, especially VR, consider subscribing for more content on tech, culture & society, health, and more to ignite a little curiosity in your life.

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Go to the History of VR – Timeline of Events and Tech Development for more info on the timeline of VR.