Of the other presentations, the most engaging, for me, was Kenny Pridgen’s detailing the history of virtual reality. Kenny had a lot of real information and commanded attention with his energy and tone, which resulted in my learning more from his presentation than anyone else’s. Here is what I retained from that learning:

Luray Caverns, VA

Virtual reality has actually been around as a concept for a really long time, as in the early 1800s, when photo viewers were made with pictures taken from slightly different angles to simulate our eyes and make it feel like the viewer is ‘really there.’ I had photo viewers as a kid that adults would buy for me from various museum or landmark giftshops. My favorite was from Luray Caverns because it was a dreamlike experience seeing the caverns as a child and the pictures of that place are just phenomenal.

Edwin Link's early flight simulator

From the photo viewer, we moved to flight simulator “coffins,” as Kenny described them. I went looking for a picture of these coffins and was surprised to find that I disagree with the comparison. As you can see, that is clearly a mini airplane. This yet again reminds me of my childhood—yes, I will continue to make it about me—because my maternal grandfather, who fought in Vietnam and is something of a war history buff, has a whole flight simulator setup in his den in the basement of my grandparents’ house and would annually display his setup at WWII Weekend in Reading, PA (see right). He taught me how to fly using the throttle/joystick thing and introduced me to the inverted y-axis, which would prove disruptive to my video gameplay and scroll direction preferences for the rest of my life.

Sometime after these flight simulators, they made a VR headset that could only be used in labs because it had to be attached to a rig suspended from the ceiling. I don’t know what exactly this was used for, but it was too involved and large to be made into a consumer product, so we moved on.

The next stage that I remember, although I’m certain my memory fails me regarding intermediate stages, is the SEGA VR headset, which was fully head-mounted and semi-successful, except for that it made people sick, which is a common issue with which we’re stilling contending in today’s VR. Nintendo also tried a version of VR near the time of SEGA’s but theirs was a stationary tabletop model that did not perform as well on the market. 

Resident Evil 7 VR gameplay

Oculus made the first viable consumer VR headset, and I remember when this came out and started to gain traction. A bunch of my friends in school got them for Christmas that year and SUPERHOT, a slow-motion first-person shooter puzzle game, was very popular, along with immersive horror games such as Resident Evil. I never had one, nor did I use a VR headset until years later—I want to say 2021?—when my younger sister got a newer version for Christmas.

My personal opinion is that, while it didn’t make me sick, the VR was a disconcerting experience nonetheless: I enjoy a lot of videogames and have nothing against a little escapism from time to time, but the physical act of covering my eyes and the resulting sensations of confusion (I hope I don’t walk into something or step on the dog.) and character transcendence (I am quite literally a Jedi right now.) was strange. I didn’t know I had a line when it came to escapism, but VR discovered it for me. I was no longer a college student passing time with friends on Minecraft; I was someone else, or no one, nearly completely. The worst part was 1) the headache I’d get from the weight and skull-constriction of the contraption and 2) the taking off of the headset and brutal adjustment to reality. 

woman uses VR instead of pain management meds

I’ve read stories about how some mothers will use VR headsets during birth in order to help ease the agony. Commentary on these stories ranged from traditionalist disgust that mothers wouldn’t want to be fully present during the most painful thing most of these women would ever experience to borderline misandrist-feminist condonement and reminders that modern women only give birth lying down, which is a more painful, unnatural position, because a misogynist creep hundreds of years ago wanted to watch. I found myself somewhere in between disgust and support, finding it very reasonable to want to distract oneself from extreme pain but also a little weird that this was happening for the very reason it was effective—the dissociative quality of VR that makes pain less painful, I suspect, makes other emotions less emotional as well, which feels like a dangerous place to me. There’s definitely a Black Mirror episode about that.