I tried VR for the first time last night at an Homage To Color Exhibit at Ruth’s Table – this turned out to be the perfect place for the experience, since I had already been paying a lot of attention to perception as I moved back and forth looking at the various color experiments from multiple angles, and talking with mathematician-artist Alex Benedict about how colors are really just speeds. As for VR, the exhibit by Jason Marsh was appropriately abstract with colored lines reaching into the distance and floating balls one wanted to grab.
Once I’d put on the headset a strange sensation gradually crept up on me. It was a little like reading, or dreaming – somehow more spatial, but with the same relaxing effect one has when one is both in and not in the body.
In the VR experience I could move and my movements had an effect on the landscape I was seeing. When I ducked under a line, for example, I could move underneath it and see its paper-thin thickness. I could also move my hands, and although I could not see them either in real space or in the VR, I fully expected to be able to grab the balls I saw in the air and tried to multiple times, despite this having no effect on the objects I saw in screen. Oh well, thought my brain, I guess they’re ghosts. My brain seemed to be satisfied with that.
It was when I took off the VR machine, however, that I really felt its impact. It seemed as if my hippocampus had been squeezed out in a similar way to how becoming blackout drunk or put to sleep by drugs will create an expunging reset (not that I do those things often). I felt I could see better out of one eye, and that parts of the brain that had previously lay fallow were awakened and happy about this.
Sadly, the effect did not last more than a day or so. I found myself wanting more, but also worrying that the euphoric feeling might wear off if I tried this too many times.
Does anybody else have thoughts on this stuff?
