How Long Will People Stay Immersed in Virtual Reality?

A friend of mine recently put on a pair of virtual reality goggles, and was lost to the rest of the world for five hours straight. And with one VR announcement after another coming out of E3 this week, such as Valve's technology which enables people to avoid real obstacles while in VR, I've been spending a lot of my hours wondering just how typical his experience will soon become.

Here's what Blair Erickson thought after spending 5 hours in VR:

"By the end of it all, the regular world was so... Regular. Even with the currently limited resolution and somewhat heavy device, you can immediately see how powerful this medium is going to become... it already works its magic on the brain pretty damn well." (Blair, by the way, is a VR pioneer himself, directing the first feature film to be displayed in the Oculus Rift.)

Blair stayed in virtual reality even when he sensed outside intrusion happening beyond his goggles: "When an outside experience occurs, you usually ignore it or flip to Pass Through mode which allows you to see outside the headset through a camera image displayed on your vision."

"How's it feel to have to cut out of the VR experience to see what's going on in real life?" I asked him.

"Surreal and sort of 'oh weird, I didn't quite expect reality to be here'."

These were not even expansive, multi-user Second Life/High Fidelity-type virtual world experiences, by the way, but stand-alone games. Even then, the effect was powerful and all encompassing:

"There were a ton of awesome experiences," Blair tells me. "The more involved I got in them the less I was aware of the outside world or really even having a body outside the limited actions inside. Bandit Six, where you're a WWII tailgunner shooting Nazis out of the sky. It just sucked me in and became completely immersive. My world was just sitting in the back of that plane shooting down Nazis. The other game that really got me was this amazingly complex puzzle strategy game called Darknet. You download yourself into a matrix like network of nodes and information. Then use viruses to try and weaken firewalls and work your way towards the root before the network trace reaches you. There's also a fantastic Zelda-like RPG called Herobound which has grabbed me in how well done it handles third person cartoon worlds."

I tell Blair I'm nervous to try VR systems out, beyond the many short demos I've done. I tell him I'm afraid of being sucked in.

"When the Oculus and Vive hit stores in about 9 months to a year, you absolutely will be," Blair tells me. "I don't think there's any way around it. It brings you into the world and clears away all the distractions of reality. It's too compelling to resist."

Photos courtesy Blair, featuring friends in VR, pet dog.

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Comments

[joe]

Technodrug 2.0

Who cares if your house is burning or your child is crying for your attention?

[Cyberserenity]

I do 30 minutes a day. If i do more i start to lose reality a little. But of course life never gets the same after i got my Oculus.

[Murtle]

Not long. i just got the heads Terra d'ombrA *Maizon Rayna is closing in 3 days. wow what i nice overlooked beautiful Mediterranean villa that will be lost.

The vanderbilt estate i hear is closing by the end of the month with a loss of 200 private regions after fighting years of outside business corporations like relay for life for donations.

[Bay Sweetwater]

Meh. What's all this fuss about getting sucked in? After all: "... virtual reality is an important technology, but like videophones, not exactly a thing that fundamentally changes all of our lives."

[jay]

5 hours? Humph, wait ten years from now, people will be complaining about the "tuned out generation" or "missing millions"