Today I was having a conversation with a student about the future uses of VR and related media. I felt a sort of intellectual tension in the discussion, as though we were talking about two separate topics.
Eventually I located the source of this tension. I was talking about the use of VR to understand the evolution of every day reality, and the student was more interested in the use of VR as a medium in and of itself, as part of the evolution of artistic expression. Of course we were both interested in both of those things. It was more a matter of emphasis.
By analogy: Thomas Edison may have been primarily motivated to see people moving on film because he wanted to capture ordinary life as it happened. Yet the brothers Lumière were primarily motivated to use cinema to advance the art of narrative story telling.
It’s not either/or — it’s a question of emphasis. The choices you make in building a medium are heavily influenced by the purposes that drive you. The good thing is that even when we don’t all have exactly the same vision or goal in mind, we can still contribute to and build on each others’ efforts.
Another analogue would be to sound recording — there are significant rifts among those who at one end think of the field recordings of Alan Lomax capturing live performances of folk musicians as the perfect goal of the medium and those who see it as a completely new kind of artifact enabled at first by the studio techniques pioneered by the music concrete folks in Europe (or Brian Wilson in California, depending on your tastes)
Yes, I suspect there are many examples like this. Any medium gets better when passionate and talented people focus on it. Those people can have different reasons for advancing the same medium, but over time they all end up making it better for each other.