Project 3: School's Out

In the past, our communication method started with the standard snail mail system, then email, and now phones. As time progresses, we slowly begin to see different communication methods, and one of them is using virtual reality to create a synthetic world. Virtual reality is not just the next communication method, but it is also a technology that will enable a new form of interaction with other people. I believe this technology will one day become a tool that will bring people around the world closer. We have already begun to see some games, such as VRChat, which allows players to interact with other players worldwide.

The potential these games can bring is limitless. Imagine a world where having a meeting inside a synthetic world is the norm. You could join in a room and have a meeting with people from London and then the next minute you can join another room and have a meeting with someone from China. Seeing the direction our society is heading towards – time is money – virtual reality worlds will become a massively beneficial social progression tool. These synthetic worlds can allow one to show their idea to many other people by creating or building out their vision inside these worlds. These are beneficial to many fields, such as prototyping construction sites with multiple people interacting and communicating simultaneously. My experience with using Unity to quickly modify the EVL classroom was simple and straight forward, which allowed me to demonstrate the potential of virtual reality interaction capability.

Like everything, if there is a pro to using virtual reality for communicating and interacting, there is also a con. Unlike other communication tools, using virtual reality for interacting with other people, you must be actively "on". This means that multitasking will be very hard; for example, if you use these synthetic worlds as a meeting place, it is tough for someone to take notes during that meeting. The fact that we are using a fake body to represent who we are will lose our human to human connection. Our passive body language will not be picked up in these virtual reality interactions, resulting in the sense of being robotic. The interaction between humans and the interaction between game objects will feel weird and awkward due to simple physics. The physics level in these virtual reality interactions is not at a level where it can be comparable to the real world. This does not mean we do not have the technology to build the physics for the synthetic worlds (for example, Rainbow Siege). It is just that many users do not have the capable hardware to run at that level of detail.

In conclusion, the idea of using virtual reality to create a synthetic world is a plausible method of communicating and interacting with people. But the current hardware technology level cannot fully bring out what a virtual reality interaction can do, limiting many people to accept this new method. With that being said, I believe developers should continue to innovate games like VRChat to pioneer this tool and one day make a breakthrough.