Of Metaverse, Mescaline and the experiences
“We live together, act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain.By its very nature, every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about the experiences but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”
-Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception
When I recently tried the Oculus Quest2 and drowned myself in the available experiences out there, some more than the others heightened the perception in the virtual world - a truckload more than what I experienced moments ago in the real world.Once I took the headset off, the brain and body recalibration took a few seconds or so it seemed. It was fantastic but I don’t think I can do it often.
That is what the metaverse is all about - transporting you into the virtual with a feel beyond the physical. Carl Jung and Aldous Huxley would have loved to experiment in VR and compare to the effect of psychedelics or even use VR after consuming some Mescaline - that would by some hyper experience I wager.
So, now then, virtual reality (VR) heavily relies (read amplifies) upon visual dominance which in turn means that the mind believes what it sees over the other senses and almost all VR experience fabrics are stitched with concepts of neurobiology and human factors.
This means the real measurement is in how disconnected a user is from the real world and thus how immersed and present she is in the virtual. Therefore as a user, I need to maybe wear a few more on body monitors like a smartwatch to know if my adrenalin is not going out of whack to send me into a shock or such. Maybe.
The metaverse has been talked about a lot in the recent month - it’s a digital parallel to the real world. In my reckoning, the pandemic already pushed a lot of us to be more comfortable in the digital more than the physical and which is why many folks are having withdrawal symptoms when asked to return to the physical - work, interactions and the likes. The degree of comfort with which the human race adapted to operate in the digital world in the last almost two years, must have given a lot of confidence to the folks now bent on nudging us to go deeper in the virtual.
If you have seen the movie Surrogates, which was based on a comic by Robert Venditti which in turn was inspired by Cybergypsies written by Indra Sinha. The movie takes it far and beyond where humans sit comfortably in their homes and live in the real world virtually while cyborgs/humanoids or whatever you fancy calling them.
The metaverse is a couple of generations behind that possibility - it’s a fully immersive 3-Dimensional space/environment spawned for you. It’s not bridging the gap between the real and virtual but taking you deeper into the virtual and making it seem real as a result of the spatial experience(s) that the technology can create. Haptic and biometric capabilities will make touch as another experience soon.
You create a version of you to interact with a version of several others in cyberspace and the spatial build-up makes it feel real. Microsoft is recreating the virtual work environment in the same spirit via the Mesh. It’s like captain James T Kirk telling Scotty to beam him up and teleportation holoportation is done!
Loosely analogical to app stores on our smartphones, several communities are driven by creators or the other way round will mushroom in Web3.0 - a version of the internet that warrants separate writing.
VR devices could (would) be the new smartphones. It’s coming, like it or not, this wave where the real world will be the second choice. Homosapiens are on their way to being virtually social and socially virtual beings.