Today I enrolled in a virtual exercise program. It was an app that I could download onto my VR headset.
When I started it up, I found myself in a very pleasant environment, and a very fit looking instructor appeared before me and started guiding me through physical exercises. After each exercise the instructor would tell me what a great job I was doing.
Except I wasn’t doing the exercises. I was just standing there taking the whole thing in.
So the illusion of presence was broken right from the start, because it immediately became obvious that the instructor was just a recording. Which isn’t necessarily a show stopper, but it is radically different from exercise with a real instructor.
I found myself wondering whether it would have been better, perhaps through the use of some advanced AI technology, if the virtual instructor had actually realized that I wasn’t doing the exercises and had responded appropriately. And I thought maybe not — maybe that would have just been creepy.
Sometimes it can be better when technology doesn’t try to do too much. 🙂