Valve demo, revisited

I saw the Valve VR demo again today, about seven months after I first tried it.

I had been worried that the experience would not hold up to my memory, that maybe I had talked myself into thinking it was better than it actually was.

Fortunately, that is not at all what happened. It not only held up, but it made me realize what the Valve VR demo achieves, which I have not seen yet in any other version of VR:

You don’t think that you are in virtual reality. You look around and things are just there, you reach for an object to pick it up, and it is exactly where you think it will be. Your sense of proprioception and your peripheral vision never fail you.

In other words — and unlike any VR demo I have yet seen — you are simply in reality, as rock solid as you would expect reality to be.

It just doesn’t necessarily need to be this reality.