20 years ago, virtual reality was the future. Heavy monitors and smoke-coloured chassis were to be replaced by a nice pair of VR-glasses and instead of icons on a desktop we would reach out and touch futuristic 3D-worlds. Like Keanu in “Johnny Mnemonic”. Today, these dreams are dead, but does that mean our experience of room in the digital environment is?
In 1992, about the same time “The Lawnmower Man” hit the big screen and Neil Stephenson’s novel “Snow Crash” portrayed the virtual world “The Metaverse”, I went to a computer exhibition. The main attraction was a virtual reality machine. You’d don the helmet and then went out into a shaky vector landscape to shoot down shaky vector condors.
It’s soon 2010 and it’s already been a couple of years since someone actually believed we could use “Second Life” for anything useful.
The dream of virtual reality was a dream of the future, but the future is already here. Even if we don’t feel like flashing bowls of lightning flying throw cyberspace when we logon to Gmail, it’s still more advanced than shooting vector condors.
I believe the virtual reality fantasies were more rooted in a basic human behaviour. We crave a space that we can call our own. From cave to farm to designer waterfront villa the concept of “home” has always been central for humankind.
It struck me yesterday as my work computer crashed. After the re-installation my tweaks, settings and modifications gone and I felt like I was… in somebody else’s kitchen.
The cutlery wasn’t in the top drawer. The knives weren’t next to the stove. The cutting board I couldn’t find at all.
A newly installed operating system is very much like moving into a new apartment. You have to chose colours, plan the space. Although the screen is 2D and the OS defines what limits we have to work with, today’s computer use is a deeply personal experience. The looks and configurations of our utilities and services are so customized that using them more than anything resembles furnishing a home.
William Gibson once said that there won’t just come a morning where we’ll look into an infrared dawn and say “Look! It’s the future!”. Everything evolves, little by little. And I think we now dare to say the mesh of RSS feeds, autopost functions, avatar pictures, colour schemes and lifestreams is our virtual reality. Without the helmets. And without vector condors.
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