When you’re spending more time indoors than outdoors, your home is becoming, quietly, your world. A world where distractions lack, with the exception of books, TV, Internet, game consoles and pretty soon, virtual reality systems. Decades ago, they couldn’t engage people more than a couple of hours daily; now, it’s family, friends and co-workers that can’t trigger a reaction. The means of escaping reality have evolved thanks to technological progress and the ultimate reward seems to be the complete removal of body and senses from this reality to another dimension. The cost of these escapades is beautifully interpreted in the short film “Uncanny Valley” #realitymagic
The year is… doesn’t really matter. At the rate virtual reality platforms and gears are progressing, let’s assume in the near future. Society is torn apart, with some people living in VR dependent neighbourhoods. There are actual psychologists to help them get over this addiction. They are the only ones to visit VR “addicts”; for them, “life is boring, lonely, too quiet”. There’s no couple in sight, no mother and daughter, no family. Just individuals that believe they can really be themselves in VR.
Some use virtual reality to spice up their lives; others see it as a place where they can’t be controlled or frowned upon. To veterans, I bet, such a place would only bring back nightmares from the war. But to the majority, Earth has become too “peaceful” and the prospective of always fighting, without ever really dying or getting hurt is tempting.
Skydiving, paragliding, rock climbing are real sports that can offer a similar intensity, but that do require effort and training. VR, in turn, can offer all the thrills, but none the risks.
Or maybe just one, the most dangerous one: hanging between two dimensions, not knowing which one is real and which isn’t. Could you bare getting something so good, so authentic, so similar to reality, that one day you would have to scrape for memories to remember who you are?
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