Improving Our Standard of Living (Wattpad Edition)

Chapter 50: Virtual Reality

Virtual reality is interaction with information technology involving one or more of the body's senses.

There are several senses including sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, temperature detection, balance perception, and others.

Virtual reality today is primitive. It mostly involves two senses—vision and hearing. Controllers used for video games vibrate during intense action, so the sensation of touch is partially immersed in those instances.

Interaction with a device involving only some of the senses is partial-immersion virtual reality. When people watch TV, for example, they're immersed in an audio-visual virtual reality. When they're quietly doing tasks on their smartphones, they're in a visual virtual reality only. When they're talking on their phones, they're engaged in an audio virtual reality.

Even the mere act of reading text is an example of visual virtual reality. A text adventure, for instance, is more immersive to some gamers than triple-A titles with modern graphics. Some games utilize ASCII graphics, which are also composed of text. At a distance, such a game looks like code from The Matrix films, but to the player, it's highly engaging.

No rule says that a virtual reality must be composed of pretty three-dimensional graphics.

Reading a book is also a type of virtual reality even though it isn't digital. A book is a product of information technology.

Think of it from the author's perspective. Suppose you have a fantasy story. You want other people to experience this vivid world you've created. To do that, you must "upload" this data into other people's brains. You could do that by making a movie, composing a play, creating a game, programming a virtual reality app, writing a book, etc. Fundamentally, it's all the same, just in different formats. It's the transference of information from the brain of one person into others. Recall that any type of information can be converted to any other form. In the end, it's all zeros and ones, no matter the format.

When someone reads a book, they're downloading the information from the brain of the author into their own brains. They're experiencing the world of the writer. This can be highly immersive, often more than a movie or game.

The human brain is a Turing complete computer. (Anything that processes information and can create algorithms is a computer.) Rather than generating digital flashes, sounds, smells, etc., the virtual reality of a book requires the brain of the reader to create these things on its own. That's the only difference. Immersion is still taking place, but the brain is doing more work in the case of a book.

How can a book be a virtual reality when it isn't directly stimulating the senses?

Actually, it is. But the extent depends on how immersed the reader is. Imagining a scene in a book stimulates the neurons that process vision. This applies to the other senses as well.

In one study, neuroscientists gave people MRI scans while they read stories. They found that when the participants read about characters performing hand actions, neurons involved with those hand motions activated in their brains [1]. This was true for the other senses as well. Reading about a character having a bright light shined in his or her face triggers some of the same neurons as if it happened to the reader. Reading about a loud noise triggers some of the same neurons as if the reader had heard a loud noise. Reading about a delicious meal is enough to make some people literally salivate. A well-crafted romantic encounter puts the brains of readers in the action.

The strength of the immersion depends on how good the author is at explaining things and how engaged the reader is. Saying the phrase "bright light in your face" won't trigger the same response as a well-crafted story that has the reader on the edge of his or her seat.