Science Museum VR is distinct from industrial VR. It is free from considerations of practical payoff apart from its attraction of visitors who come for the sole purpose of recreation and education. So what kind of messages should we intend to convey and what kind of experiences should we let visitors have when they are hooked up to our VR facility?
The same unique type of messages and experiences derived from the museum VR should continue to be significant no matter how far the specific applications could in the future have been developed in the industry. This is possible only if we are not concerned about what VR can do for our economy. Instead, our only concern would be how VR can help us understand the nature of reality. We want our visitors to pose and contemplate, during and after their visit, the deepest questions such as: "To what extent can we distinguish the illusory from the real?" "Is it possible that we had already been immersed in a sophisticated virtual world long before we ever heard of virtual reality?" "Is it possible for us to live in the virtual world forever as if it is the only world we know of?" etc.
Therefore, I have the following proposal for the concept design of the science museum VR (all bolded words hereafter will pertain only to events in VR). The described concrete process is just one of the many possible ways to exemplify the principle.
1. The evasive boundary between the actual and the virtual at the entrance and exit of VR
After the visitor puts on the outfit (helmet, gloves, etc.), she sees the same surrounding as she saw before (the VR facility in the hall with other furniture, the wall, etc.) and also sees herself wearing the outfit. So the VR outfit she is wearing does not seem to change her vision of anything, and the helmet does not seem to block her eyesight. She is now instructed by a "curator" to exit from the VR room and walk to the street outside the museum. But as soon as she reaches the street, she sees a totally unfamiliar scene and the "curator" tells her that she is already in the virtual world.... Toward the end of her VR experience, she sees a sign at an exit saying "Back to the Real World." She takes that exit. Then she sees the "curator" again. The "curator" tells her to take off her VR outfit by following specific instructions. So she takes them off and suddenly she sees the familiar scene of the VR room as she saw before she started the game. But in reality the "taking off" was merely her virtual experience as programmed, and she actually remains in the suit; the strict instructions made her unable to see through the trick directly. She is now possibly believing that she is back to the real world. As she walks toward the "exit" of the VR room, she is offered to taste a cookie which the museum has prepared for visitors. She tries to take a bite but fails! At the same moment, the whole field of vision turns suddenly to a total darkness. This final strike makes her realize that she is still in the virtual world. After a few seconds, she is released from the VR outfit and back to the real world. How can she know for sure that she is not tricked once again? Take it easy. She will be offered another chance to taste the cookie. This time she can take a real bite and...
2. The degree of real-ness of a virtual object as the perceived degree of agreement among senses and degree of its independence from our wishes
How "real" something is perceived to be co-relates, on the one hand, to how much agreement our different sense organs can reach on its presence, and on the other hand, to the degree of its perceived independence from our arbitrary wishes. In order that the visitor's experience of the real-ness takes a smooth transition from and to the actual world, we may let the following happen. After the visitor passed the initial stage of entrance, everything she perceives can be seen, touched, and heard (when stricken) at the same time. A baseball bounces back from the wall and as she catches it her hand is hurt a little bit; when she holds it, she feels the heaviness just like an actual baseball. Everything also obeys the same laws of physics as in the actual world. Cars run according to the same traffic rules and the wind blows and bends the trees as usual. Things such as a house, a mountain, etc. stand still, not undergoing obvious changes. Other things such as water and traffic evolve independently from her observation. She sees a BMW waiting for the light to turn green. Then she turns around seeing a dog trying to bite his own tail. Seconds later when she turns back to see what has happened to that BMW she sees it running, about 20 meters away from where it was, accelerating... thus in the time lapse between her two looks at the car, the event related to the car evolves by itself in a lawful manner as we see in the actual world. But eventually she will see things not as "real." Whereas those objects may still evolve independently from her wishes, the process is not as lawful and predictable as the behavior of the BMW she saw earlier. A bird suddenly appears in the sight and next changes to a model airplane and then vanishes into the thin air in no time; her own body also changes from the slim-sized to a bulky one and... Later, things simply become "illusory" because when she sees a strange object heading toward her and tries to push it away, her hand does not meet any resistance. She catches a baseball but the ball is weightless. She can however order these flashy objects to change into something else by giving a verbal command. Finally she can give command so as to teleport herself instantly to any place she wants and rebuild the whole environment at will, and let all kinds of fantastic objects come and go in caprice... After all variations as described in items 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 below, she will take a backward path, that is, from the "illusory" to the "real" before she returns to the actual world.
3. Possibility of alternative sensory frameworks
Our perceptual experience of the physical world is contingent upon what sense organs we happen to possess. But we tend to be conditioned to believe that the world as we perceive it is as it is by itself. Immersed in VR, the visitor can be lead to realize that other possible sensory frameworks might work as well as, or better than, the one she actually has without the VR outfit. 1) The visitor steps out of a room and sees the scene directly taken by an outdoor video camera without modification. She also hears the same sound directly picked up by microphones. She sees and hears everything the same as we see and hear in the actual world. But when she turns her head, the scene changes twice as fast as it does in the actual world because the camera is designed to be controlled by her turn at a doubled speed, so after her head has turned only 180 degrees, she returns visually to the point at which she began. 2) Now it's time, she is told, for her to have cross-sensory perception: suddenly, the sound signals are transformed to light signals and light signals to the sound signals with corresponding variables by the computer, and she begins to see things that we hear, and hear things that we see. When a fire-truck rushes by, she sees a trace of brilliant light dashing through, which is a result of the sound of the sirens. When we see a sharp lightning followed by a deafening thunder, she hears the sound caused by the light first and then sees the sharp light caused by the sound of the thunder. 3) After cross-sensory perception, she now sees and hears things with expanded bracket of wavelengths: she will see things emitting only ultra- violet or infra-red rays which we cannot see, and hear ultrasound transformed into regular sound. 4) Still after, she will experience things of shifted scale: she can, with the help of a microscope linked to the computer, "zoom in" to see and touch the hills and bumps on the surface of the glass that is the smoothest of all to those not in VR. She can also "zoom out" to have a bird view of the earth by flying away from the earth with the help of a transmitter that receives signals from a satellite. All these variations should be arranged in the middle of the transition from the "illusory" to the "real".
4. Finite yet unbounded space
Common sense makes us believe that the infinitely large and the infinitely small are infinitely apart from each other. We can break things downward into smaller and smaller and still smaller pieces infinitely on the one hand, and we can travel upward further and further and still further infinitely on the other. But this picture of the infinite unbounded space has long been jeopardized. Instead, Einstein's understanding of the space as finite yet unbounded has prevailed. But before VR we have not been able to experience any one of the possible models of such a space. Here in VR we can provide an opportunity for the visitor to experience at least two of these models. 1) A space whose edge on the largest end meets with its smallest possible unit. The visitor "zooms in" downward to see the smaller and smaller details of an object but at one point she gets through the threshold of the smallest unit. At that point, she is brought to see the same view as she would have seen if she started with continuous "zooming out" upward. Now as she continues to "zoom in" she will return to the scene of her starting point. Conversely, she can start with "zooming out" upward so she can also reach the same threshold and get through it and return to the same place she departed from. Here space is perceived as curled up with the largest "outer edge" and the smallest "inner edge" joined together. The trick is that the program is written in such a way that the loop is actually there to permit things to evolve by themselves while not eliminating the necessary sense of continuity during the visitor's adventure. 2) The second model is simpler. The visitor travels straight ahead and eventually returns to the point of her departure. Her visual, audio, and tactile perception all verify her return.
5. Interaction among participants
In the actual world, since our body is subject to other's physical attack, we have to be very protective in dealing with strangers. But in the virtual world, nobody can physically affect us in a way our self-managed program does not allow. We set the limit in the infrastructure to prevent any serious injury. Except for some minimum privacy as an added flavor, we can be maximally open to all other participants insofar as our psychological make-up allows. After meeting the "curator" at the entrance, the visitor will meet other participants. For the sake of convenience, images of real participants
6. Second-level virtual world within the virtual world
The visitor sees in the virtual world a museum exactly like the museum she saw in the actual world: the one she is actually in. She is instructed by the same "curator" to enter the museum and put on the VR outfit as she did before she actually entered VR. She starts the process of an allegedly new virtual-virtual experience entirely comparable to the earlier VR experience... After a while, she exits from the alleged virtual-virtual world by "taking off" the outfit and comes "back" to the first-level virtual world.
7. Possibility of the inside-out control
If we cannot control the physical process in the actual world from the virtual world, the VR game remains a mere game. But if through robots we can affect the physical world from inside the virtual world, VR and cyberspace might begin to become a habitat of the human race when developed to the extreme. In order to convey such a message, a robot is placed in a separate room. The robot is there ready to be manipulated by the visitor for a virtual-actual interface and pick up a few objects and re-arrange them following the visitor's pattern of conduct in the virtual world. The visitor is instructed to enter a room which is an exact copy of the room of robot. She is told that she can move those objects in whatever way she wants and must remember how those objects end up with when she leaves the room. After she is back to the actual world, she sees that objects in the room of robot are arranged exactly the same way as she did them in the virtual world. She was having a tele-presence experience from the virtual to the actual. NASA has been reportedly engaged in the research of this kind of telepresence for many years.
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Further questions for the visitor:
* If virtual reality can be perceived as real as actual reality, is there an ultimate difference between the actual and the real?
** Can the inside-out control be expanded to the process of the whole industrial and agricultural production?
*** Can the inside-out control be further extended to human reproduction?
**** If we can control the physical process in the actual world from the virtual world, why can we not also live in the virtual world forever?
***** If we can have a second-level virtual world, would many more levels of virtual world also be possible?
****** After all these considerations, is it possible that our so-called "actual" world is already a virtual world?
This Meseum Concept Design Is an Excerpt from a Book,
Get Real: A Philosophical Adventure in Virtual Reality
Order this book Get Real here now
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