The Metaverse: Epiphanies

The Metaverse: Epiphanies

By?Ralph R. Zerbonia, Metaverse News Network Columnist

The Metaverse for me is often a land of epiphanies. Take the idea of Virtual Reality. Those words, the very first words to label the concept of a digital place that was indistinguishable to sight and sound from reality, and more or less embedding the idea that VR needed to be very realistic to be able to convince (fool?) the observer.

But to anyone watching the state of VR over the years, especially in gaming, many popular games had nice, but not particularly photorealistic representations. And yet, even though the gamer was in a less than perfectly rendered universe, they acted as if it were real.

For awhile it seemed to me that this wasn’t the same as belief in that universe, rather just someone willing to overlook the obvious deficiencies to play the game they enjoyed. Or maybe it was just a matter of adding in human imagination to make the belief equation complete. ?But then a different idea began to take hold.

What if belief is actually able to be suspended? What if it is possible to make a deliberate decision that initiates this suspension? An affirmative physical action, much like flipping a switch would be to lighting a room. What if the affirmative action IS putting on and wearing a headset, that not only blocks sight of reality, but also starts your brain down a path of acceptance of the imminent visions? You know when you are putting on a headset or glasses that you are going to soon be in another place, it is not a surprise.

I now think that the behaviors of entering the virtual worlds are a ritual, initially a conscious one, but in very short order a routine and then unconscious ritual action. A set of actions which has a now expected outcome, to make the world as it is go away and present a different reality to your eyes. It’s a ritual that actually does have you suspending at least disbelief, and believing your lying eyes - as long as the universe operates as expected, i.e. the virtual buttons work when pushed.

If you can operate in a world successfully, then you leave the realm of NEEDING to believe. You are a believer - an operational believer, and with good reason – your actions work!

Think about being in a place so real, you are convinced you are living in real time reality. Now turn on the faucet and blood comes pouring out. Open the refrigerator to find a swimming pool entrance. As you try and use the car it begins to start sinking right into the earth! Nothing works the way it should or even consistently. If your senses say real and your mind is yelling WTF!, you will slowly see your sanity disappear without some resolution. All because things didn’t work the way you expected, as they should have in the real world and nothing you do works.

For me it was an epiphany to realize that it is not the eye-candy, or even the story, that makes it real. What makes it effectively real is the affirmative physical action of putting on the headset and logging in, PLUS, once entered, a universe that works as you expect it to work. The headset protocols are the switch that suspends disbelief, but only if you get the expected behavior from the virtual universe.

That bar to be virtually convincing, went from being too high to being almost nonexistent as long as things worked as they should.

Saying the bar is almost non-existent feels like a gross exaggeration, but it’s not if you put the final piece of the puzzle in place: Humans are tool users. VR is mostly a tool to do something, access another place or thing, and in being a tool (that works) it now becomes a part of reality itself.

When you use tools daily, in a routine manner, what else are they but real. If they impact reality as expected, then using a word like virtual as an adjective for reality starts to change in meaning. Now you may mean only that the tool exists in AR/VR, but its effects are as real as a hammer on a nail.

Of course, in AR/VR constructs made for entertainment, operational reality does not bestow actual reality, yet with enough time in a universe that operates with consistent physics, you are sure to find individuals who when entering that universe actually put the reality it represents on like a second skin, reacting as if they truly believed in its reality.

We have yet to come to grips with what a truly immersive digital experience will do to the individuals who make the choice for life on the other side. If you spend 7-9 hours sleeping and more than 12 in AR/VR, you are bound to see yourself in a very different light. If that number drops from 12 to 6 or 8, is that really much different? For the modern factory worker, it may just be their normal workday.

I think humans change when their powers and skills change. I have been augmented with eyeglasses since the 4th grade. I’ve had my teeth augmented with filled cavities and even dentures. My heart has been augmented with a stent to keep the blood flowing. None of this seems to have made me less human or different than others. But I am different, my physical flaws are now corrected, perhaps even better. ?But augmenting my brain with an annotated environment informed with A.I. and data galore, may make me think differently, and that would surely impact my humanity.

Struggling with reality, and living in various realities are all ahead of us but now coming up fast. As a species we will soon have new designations from Homo Sapiens, I always thought Homo Augmentis sounded right and am toying with Homo Digient for the fully virtualized individual! Let me know if you have better suggestions, I’m always looking for those new descriptions and the changes in human nature.

? 2021 Ralph R. Zerbonia with first publication rights to Shauna Lee Lange dba Metaverse News Network, All other rights reserved.

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Ralph R. Zerbonia is a serial?technology entrepreneur. As a business consultant and Microsoft Partner and member in the Microsoft Mixed Reality Partners group he has provided counsel on IoT, the Metaverse, Spatial Computing, and AR/VR/XR. He is now focused on the changes and opportunities coming from the Metaverse.

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