Scenes from a typical day in the virtual world of tomorrow:
You wake up and attend to your daily bathroom rituals, which unfortunately will never be replaced by any virtual reality process… Thus, after your real world morning ceremonies are completed, it’s time to get immersed in your virtual world…. By the time you put on all your gear and make all the proper calibrations, nearly an hour has passed and you’re still not even logged in… It’s like getting ready for a joust, only you don’t have servants and footmen to help you get dressed.
Harvey Newquist in the Premier Issue of the Virtual Reality Special Report, 1994
With apologies to Matt at PaleoFuture (’cause I spotted this article first, but it’s really apropo of his blog), Newquist takes a hard poke at the realities of (im)practical Virtual Realities. In addition to the clumsiness factor, he somehow drags in Hillary Clinton and the Center for Disease Control:
Getting dressed up, sharing greasy headsets – it all sounds pretty grim, doesn’t it? … As everyone from Hillary Clinton to the Center for Disease Control begins to worry about what kind of communicable diseases you can get… people are going to get a little bit more finicky about what they strap onto their bodies…
Newquist concludes:
We want VR to grow up to be warm and friendly like Ward Cleaver. What we might get if we don’t give more thought to the VR interface is Ted Bundy.
And all this time I’ve been striving for Al Bundy!
Read the whole article: A Day In The Life for yourself!
