Just about every time I give a talk about the possibilities of virtual reality, somebody asks me whether I think there is a danger that VR will replace reality. And I always tell them that I don’t worry about that, because all historical precedent shows otherwise.<\/p>\n
Each time a new medium comes out, people worry that it will “replace reality”. I suspect that this perception is really a consequence of the newness of the medium, which leads people to mischaracterize it.<\/p>\n
In its time, each new medium for distributing content was worried over, as a potential “reality killer”. Books, photography, audio recording, cinema and television are just some examples.<\/p>\n
More recently, the rise of the high speed internet has coincided with a dramatic increase in long distance air travel. When people know more about a place in the world, they are more likely to take the effort to visit it in person.<\/p>\n
Referring to historical precedent isn’t always convincing. After all, a person who grew up in today’s world has no real connection with the advent of books or cinema, and today’s undergrads were born into a world where the Web already existed.<\/p>\n
But today a student once again asked me the question about whether VR would replace reality, and this time I managed to phrase my answer in a more relevent way, by placing it in the context of popular music. “Album sales,” I said, “don’t kill concert sales.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Just about every time I give a talk about the possibilities of virtual reality, somebody asks me whether I think there is a danger that VR will replace reality. And I always tell them that I don’t worry about that, because all historical precedent shows otherwise. Each time a new medium comes out, people worry … Continue reading “Concert sales”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18130"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18130"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18131,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18130\/revisions\/18131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}