Virtual Reality is something that has large corporations investing heavily into it. With companies like Sony showing a high level of optimism about their VR projects, it’s hard to ignore the buzz. But a former Valve VR contractor has said that “VR is bad news,” and he explains why this is so.
Fabian Giesen worked with Valve during 2012, and then early this year, during which the company was developing Augmented Reality (AR) and VR technology. He believes that VR is anti-social and pushes people away from shared social experiences. With reference to Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus VR, he further explained:
Imagine a shared universe MMORPG, expressly operated by a company that *already knows all your friends*, that’s trying to maximize your engagement (‘hey, all your friends are playing right now, don’t you want to join too?’), selling your attention to advertisers, and by the way, also building a detailed profile on everything you do so they can do all of this even better in the future. It’s okay, go on doing whatever you want, we just want to watch! (Through your own eyeballs if possible).
I can see why many are still reserved about VR, but the development of technology is never a bad thing. A lot of the equipment we own today were a result of experiments such as these and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were criticisms back in the day as well. People have even argued that video games lead to anti-social behavior!
Do you think VR is “bad news?” Let us know.
