The VIRTUAL REALITY Fad

It seems to have some current events interest for us.

“Virtual Reality” has not been defined very clearly in the surplus of reactive publicity that has been done about it, and the first impression of those reading virtual news is that it might be a thing of  the entertainment media, where indeed the term is blithely in use and in the process of entering into a popular conceptual language where “reality shows” and “theme parks” are common terms and references.  Its actual origin, however, seems to be a scientific one, occurring just where art and stagecraft have been impinging on psychology, as is seen in psychodrama, a sort of answer to movies and stage productions having a psychological orientation, as is the case in WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, MARAT/SADE, and such films as PSYCHO and THE SNAKE PIT and THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.  This is called popular culture and is notable for crossovers, which are found also in the arts, notably in Total Environment art and music, and SenSurround motion pictures and environments, as well as psychedelic “real experience” theater and music.

     However, as to the scientific basis, it is described as a technology in its beginning stages of “research and application.” 

     “The current virtual reality technology consists of wearing goggles that produce 3-D visual images that make a person believe he is in a virtual world,” says one writer on the topic.  A true virtual reality in which a person is not aware that he is in an illusory realm is being striven after, which is possible only, the writer says, by means of “a neural direct connection that simulates electrical signals sent to the brain.”  It sounds like science fiction, but the writers on the topic say it is virtually a reality.  “The machines in the Matrix create a virtual world by developing a large set of programs and code in a massive computer mainframe.  Humans are directly plugged into this virtual world.”  The writer boasts that the people thus hooked up don't know they're in a virtual world because the virtual world is all they know.

     What the purpose of this setup is we do not have made clear for us by the writing just cited, but it seems to have something to do with psychology, perhaps being one of those tests behavioral psychologists like to run on human subjects.  Also it resembles psychodrama and perhaps is a technological augmentation of this already rather avant-garde technique.  The science involved may be a little like NOVA EXPRESS, but it doesn't have Nova Police or any of the other accouterments of that novel by William S. Burroughs.

     Already crossing over with the arts, the Virtual Reality experiments seem to have influenced Show Business, which added to it an impetus that exalted it into fad proportions.  From the entertainment business the concept spread into recreation and tourism, perhaps taking as its model Walt Disney's DISNEYLAND TV show being made into a vast amusement park catering to tourists, possibly the origin of the modern “theme parks.”  Not quite reality in that?  Take the quotation marks off and you have at least virtual reality.

     Historically, or in terms of show business history, Hollywood has, in its quest for realism beyond what the normal camera presents, gone over to 3-D, Cinemascope and then Cinerama, and finally, with Mike Todd crying out for still more, such crude devices as a sensory apparatus being placed in seats to buzz viewers as suspense mounted in such films as THE TINGLER.  Then there was talk of “SenSurround” and other innovations that would make the films (basically fantasies) seem still more real.  As creators of fantasies, they were competing with reality.  Some films, such as LA DOLCE VITA, from Italy , became more casual and undefined to present a closer parallel to life, with dancing madness replacing classical acting, ushering in “Cinema Verte,” or realistic theater, which led in turn to Andy Warhol's filming of simple street scenes.  Then there were non-movies or anti-movies such as THE LAST MOTION PICTURE and THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (which invited audience participation), or (again with dancing madness) IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD.

     Considering again that movies tend toward fantasy, a lot of the action toward Greater Reality ended up in science fiction movies, where fantasies were given scientific rationalizations, if not explanations.  One film in the genre which might be called virtual was GALAXY QUEST, in which Tim Allen (who has public-invited-to-be-in-it situation comedies on television) acted the role of an actor whose science-fiction movie, still in the making, was taken seriously by ETs who abducted the entire cast, valuing their expertise and original approach to the problem, and who set them all to work solving the galactic problem which had its similitude in the movie they were making, titled GALAXY QUEST just as was the movie about that movie being made, having a stereopticon effect that could be considered a virtual reality technique.  The audience to the movie being made in the movie were present too, and were made up of an audience of the movie which was being made overall; in other words, the role of the audience of the production was played by gawkers at Hollywood productions, the motion picture fan clubs.

     Allen has a book out called I'M NOT REALLY HERE which brings in question whether things in life are real or not, supported in his text by Zen and Tao references.

     Allen is doubtless influenced by stage acting in these conceptions, as is Hollywood in general.  Among the virtual stage techniques are “living theater,” “theater in the round,” and audience participation theater, scripted by such playwrights as Jack Gelber and Archibald MacLeish.  The former had actors sitting in the audience and coming up in the course of a production, leading to audience participation, and the latter had a play-within-a-play which mutated into the play itself in his play JB.  Other precedents among stage productions argumentatively called “legitimate theater” were Gertrude Stein's FOUR SAINTS IN THREE ACTS, which negated the standard procedures of stagecraft in favor of what the actors were doing; Samuel Beckett's plays, which presented riffraff in a state of nihilism doing nothing of stage interest; and Luigi Pirandello's CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR, which showed people trying to make a TV series which was interfered with by their private lives, which they were trying to express publicly.

     These all have a tendency toward nihilism but are apparently trying to open the way for more actual life to get into performances, and perhaps the reverse, more performance to get into life.  Hence there is a basis for the virtual reality experience. (Perhaps public ceremonies are affected by this mode, too, e.g. the recent Inauguration, where public life and ceremonial observances were interwoven, and a demonstration against the war was staged.)

     Rod Serling's TWILIGHT ZONE established the original attitude.  His movies had been about the effect various realities had on the individual, cf. THE PAWNBROKER, or the existential meaning of boxing as in REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT.  The Twilight Zone frequently showed alternate realities and existential dislocation and was set in an artificial limbo where all realities were put aside.  He used to tell his viewers, “Perhaps this could happen to you.”

     STAR TREK and STAR WARS developed costumes and equipment for the viewers, issued manuals and marketed role-playing and other games based on their series.  Now more and more television advertising is inviting viewers to become part of the programming, to view the programs as real life, take on roles and participate in the total viewing experience.  It would seem that the public media has grown lonely in its cutoff from the “real world” and found that they really must co-relate with the audience.  There are telephone call-in shows, life games like THE SURVIVOR, shows recruited from audiences like MAD, MAD HOUSE and MR. PERSONALITY, orgies with studio audiences, advertising taken from the streets, contests with bit parts to winners, pill commercials that sit in with you and invite you to strip, on-the-spot riot and war televising, and shows that take apart small towns and then question the reality of their own scripts.  Science fiction television is especially keen in having this approach.

    The transference of this into the computer world is an easy one, considering the connections already established between television and the Internet, such as SciFi.com.  In the computer world we find a plethora of the role-playing games being conducted remotely and a lot of advertising for theme parks and reality games.  A lot of science fiction has been written about people becoming totally immersed in computer strategies until they are drawn into and trapped within a computer realm, as for example Tad Williams' OTHERLAND—and further, about computerism acquiring pawns and by means of them establishing territory in the “real world,” for example Neal Stephenson's SNOW CRASH; and again, about computer and outer reality merging so that the real and computer world are interrelated, sometimes to the point of being indistinguishable: of this one may cite the writings of William Gibson.  The term “virtual reality” originates in advertising.  A new model of a car in the planning stages is “now virtually a reality!” and so there is a lot of plugola about virtual, and very little definition of what it is besides “the coming thing,” and something you'll want to get in on.  Perhaps one should also note THE SPACE MERCHANTS by C.M. Kornbluth as a source book for interpreting the trend. Insofar as computers carry advertising, they are all for this trend.

     In virtual fiction, no explanation is given for appearances, because what's happening as the text progresses is what's happening.  Logic is not present in determining the characters' actions because logic is too structural and interferes with the happening of random events.  According to this view, life is not ordered, and by this means a sort of action fiction is evolved in which the reader can meet and face unpreordained situations and dangers.  It's somewhat an existential next step, in its crude form, suggested by Norman Mailer's statement that existential action would be preferable to existential thought.

     Virtual reality is still, as its name suggests, in a process of coming into being, and there could be further speculation into the nature and meaning of it, such as speculation as to why it was considered a desirable goal, or a goal at all, but a description of what it appears to be is adequate for the present.  As to what implications it has, we wait to see first any positive signs of its success.