Real Virtual Reality

So I was really going to try it.  I had known about it for a couple of years, and even written about it way back then.  Later, when all the style magazines caught on, and after them the trendier supplements and then finally the heavyweight daily press and television, it had all seemed rather stale, rather passé. But able to wangle a private demonstration of one of the few Virtual Reality systems – or VR as it is known to initiates - in the country, I was still disappointingly excited.

After a short pretence of being interested in the technology - an Atari PC with 'secret' graphics boards at its heart, and magnetic sensors within a ring to detect arm movement and body and head orientation - rather than mad-keen to experience the personal reality, I finally allowed myself to be plugged in.

Even before you sample VR itself, the associated accoutrements make you feel that you are strapping on the twenty-first century.  A chunky black belt goes around your waist, a neat weapon and motion unit in your hand, and a monstrously cybernautic helmet on your head.  Cables are fed from the helmet and the gun to the belt and thence to the processor inside the circular podium, from which issue struts to support the nearly-closed ring of magnetic detectors at waist height. 

As you put on the helmet you see two small colour LCDs - miniature screens - which gradually coalesce as your eyes refocus to give you stereoscopic vision.  Before you is a strange geometric world: five chessboard areas, the central one lower and connected to the four surrounding boards by rising stairs.  In each area there are rows of brightly coloured pillars.  As you turn your head you can see all around you; if you look down you can see your feet.  You move through this world by pressing a button on the handheld unit.  Your virtual heartbeat quickens, strange sounds disturb you.  Beyond the edge of the chessboards lies the blackness of infinity. 

Avoiding a fall over the edge is the least of your worries: for in this world you are being chased by a maniac with a gun - a virtual enemy, but one quite able to blast you into virtual death.  This is spectacular, and results in your being spread thinly over this tiny universe.  Happily, you are granted a virtual resurrection to live on and fight back.  And as if this were not enough in this nightmare world, there is also a pterodactyl - well, there would be - which swoops down upon you, seizes you, rises and then drops you to another spectacular virtual fragmentation.

Although movement and reaction - and hence survival - remain difficult, accepting this garish, violent world as totally real is not.  The graphics are good, and the speed of response of the system excellent.  This and its successors will doubtless prove totally addictive.  Unfortunately my own experience of VR was spoilt somewhat be two factors: first, the sharp pain I felt from having the helmet jammed down on my head inexpertly, and secondly, my abiding consciousness that I was wearing all this kit and ducking and weaving like a maniac outside the Rock Garden in Covent Garden, in full view of the gawping and guffawing public.  So for me, it was virtually Virtual Reality, but still not quite the real thing. 

(8.2.92)

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