“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”
— Robert Frost
Time spent in shared virtual reality has changed my view of walls.
Until now, I always thought of a physical wall as something that creates limits. You walk up to a wall, and then you can go no further. Specifically, a wall prevents you from getting to what is on the other side of the wall.
If you are wearing a virtual reality headset and you walk up to a physical wall, it is still true that you cannot go through the wall. But the meaning of the wall is now different.
After all, why do you want to get to the other side of a wall? Because there is some place out there that you are interested in visiting, perhaps somebody you want to see or talk to, or some event you wish to attend.
But in VR, all of the meanings become scrambled. You can see people, talk to them, attend events, wherever you are. A wall — I mean a physical, immutable wall in the real world — becomes not a barrier, but merely a guidepost.
You walk up to that wall, you see it and feel it and touch it, and then you say “Ah, this is useful. I will use this to navigate, to help me orient myself on my way to where I want to go next. Maybe to visit a colleague. Or to drop in on a neighbor.”
After all, as Robert Frost once said, good fences make good neighbors. 😉