What is (virtual) reality?
What is reality?
Before we can understand virtual reality, it’s useful to think for a moment about reality, which might be harder to pin down than you think!
According to wikipedia…
Reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or might be imagined.
In a wider definition, reality includes everything that is and has been, whether or not it is observable or comprehensible.
A still broader definition includes everything that has existed, exists, or will exist.
So that is some pretty heavy stuff!
Does anyone truly know?
Great thinkers from history such as Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Immanuel Kant, Timothy Leary or Bertrand Russell have put a lot of thought into it, but even the experts disagree on exactly what reality is, at best our knowledge is incomplete.
Hmmm, how about the scientific view then?
Reality as defined by science happens in our brains, we have our senses and from this sensory information we construct a model of reality in our heads.
Reality is a model in our brains
We don’t directly experience phenomena like light or sound, but rather our brains interpret the information it can gather in the best way that it can.
Our reality is our environment
As beings within a human body, our realities are informed by the environments in which we live, so it should come as no surprise that people from a diverse range of places have very different ways of ‘seeing’ the world.
So…What IS VR then?
Basically it’s a computer generated environment designed to fool each of our senses into thinking that we are elsewhere. A head mounted display fools our eyes, headphones provide sounds from a virtual environment and so on. As this technology develops we can expect more and more immersive virtual realities.
Into the metaverse…
This new, exciting form of media is limited only by human (or machine) imagination and we invite you to challenge us with your problems, thoughts and ideas. We look forward to being a part of the journey as together we dream up meaningful virtual realities that push the boundaries of human experience.
