Can Virtual Reality be a Substitute for Real Life Experiences?

"Why does virtual reality work? Because reality is virtual." - Lawrence Stark

Your real life experiences are virtual.

No. VR shows what we already can see. We need insight/visualisation in problems we can't see and don't understand: oncoming financial  crisis, refugees, poverty, democracy. In addition the concept of experience has no psychological, philosophical, physiological and methodological basis. It is a hype that obscures discussions.

It's evident that it can't be a substitute for all real life experiences, because as physical entities we also need the physical contact with our environment in order to learn and grow up.

In some cases VR is like a relatively new toy, and many companies are still playing with it to find out in what contexts it can contribute to a qualitative leap for people. VR should help better understand intangible concepts, but not systematically replace all other means of representation.

Virtual reality can reproduce a subset of perception,  these perception can be equal of real life perceptions?  I don't think so, but maybe can reproduce some relevant one...  best perceptions for our experience are the inner ones and how we handle these.

There are scenarios where VR is incredibly useful, e.g. medical use of VR with burn patients that uses the immersive nature of VR to engage them during painful treatments. Even in real life, a good movie, play or spectator sport takes you out of yourself and into the world created by the event; VR is an extension of this. It has the same capacity to create an environment that holds your attention and engages you.

VR is in a very nascent stage - it's highly visual, has some auditory components, some tactile feedback but misses other sensory inputs: taste, smell. The trick is to 1) figure out how it's current instantiation can be used for play, education, sharing information; 2) identify places where it ,may have value and how to implement it for these places.

Like any other technology, VR isn't a fix-all but the fun and excitement is to see where it can be a tool that enhances experience.

Justin is actually asking 4 questions in his post. I'll start with the initial one: 

Yes it can, it actually is the core idea of VR to deliver artificial substitutes for stimuli usually produced as one effect by some physical or chemical "processes" in our natural (you can say physical) environment. VR simply exchanges the "processes" by a computer generated simulation and the natural information transport from the processes to our senses by I/O devices. If the artificial stimulus is close enough to the "expected" stimulus, i.e., the stimulus as generated by the non-artififcal environmental process, human can't distinguish the source anymore and accept the artificial one as the environmental one. The question here is: How far are we away from a true (indistinguishable) stimulus generation? The answer to the latter depends on the sense you are looking at but VR research already indicates, that for many experiences one does not have to match the natural process 100%.

The follow-up question actually are going into the applicability and potential usage of VR as a tool: 

So far, the current applications of VR could be summarized like this: 

Future applications might open-up many more application areas, some might still fall under the 5 categories but who knows.

In my personal opinion and experience in this I would argue it is the latter. The question should better be redefined like this: 

I can't give you an answer to this because this essentially boils down to a cost/profit evaluation on a personal basis for every single user. If there are enough users which consider this a profit for them (in any of the given application areas or even some new ones), then it will become an essential tool for them. Is then the user-base would be big enough then it becomes a commercial success.

We have seen many technological advances, which started as a commercial failure more then one time. Still, there always have been users adopting this technology but it wasn't enough of a critical mass to make it a  commercial success (think Apple's Newton as an example) and hence it diminished after some time. This problem also creates a barrier for a wide adoption as an every-day tool users want to rely on. If a user accepts a technology into every-day life it creates  dependency on this technology. Then you want to make sure this technology is available for you as long as possible.

Hence to sum-up the latter answer, it is one of the core questions of all people investing a lot of money on VR now. It is basically a bet with a lot of risks since this development is dependent of a lot of factors as I have described. From my experiences I would say that the chances to have a VR-success at the moment has never been better in the last decades. Is it enough to become a success? Can't tell, make your own bet :)

NO virtual world can never be a subsitute for the real world. The man today has become lonely and solitary today probably due to the over indulgence in the virtual world.  

Of course we can develop a lot on this argument ...

First, why such a question ? because the answer 'no' is just too close to a lot of lips and VR is not really diffused ... 

You didn't ask : - is it really necessary to eat in real life ?

You just expect the answer :)

After that, VR is a young field of Computer Vision (and around) and one thing is sure:

Virtual Reality is a real life experience, as soon as you can make this experiment.

Waiting other 10 years to live the answer :)

Pierre

My question was generic and inquisitive about the adoption and usage of new technology.

Just take a look at how smartphones were not integral part of our life around 15-20 years ago. We were okay to communicate with our landlines and pagers and letters and telegrams. Today we are not using most of them.

People have shifted to handheld devices and made touch phones an integral part of their lives. It's not just for phonecall or a message anymore. There are apps and let us perform tasks and assist us in our daily activities.

We feel that we cannot leave the phone anywhere and stop thinking about it. Our fitness, finance, meetings, events, mail, communication with friends or family in terms of chats, video, etc. all are taken care of by the devices that we use.

Same way, could VR be something which changes the current trend? especially in some sectors.

I would say that for consumers one of the most exciting things about VR is that it allows people to experience things that are either to expensive or dangerous to do in real life (swim with sharks or stand at the top of a mountain range).  I think you have a good point about VR being used in applications where it may not be required, the flat cinema screen in a 360 room I don't see the attraction of.  However, I think fitness (for rehabilitation) and social interaction applications (for communication, exposure therapies and teaching) might be useful for some people.  I also know it is a very useful tool for communicating processes and designs that might otherwise be to difficult or complex to understand when viewing flat plans.  AR also offers it own range of applications, identifying parts in an engine for example.  VR and AR have allot of potential applications it will be exciting over the next few years to see how these develop, whether it will be as frequently used as a phone will probably depend on quality of content, be it 360 video or interactive free viewpoint virtual environments.         

Hello, what I wanted to say is VR is a feeling of real life. VR is in real life.

The gap is similar to the one addressing movies: we continue to travel even if we can watch movies.

But we watch movies mainly for other purpose than travelling, mainly for life experience, as we can also read books …

So VR will take a similar place than movies and books when the technology used will be less restrictive, more invisible, more ‘evident’. If the technology is boring, invasive, not fluent, bugged, slow, it  won’t be used by a lot of people and won’t reach his goal.

What I think, is that we have to wait a bit for a new technological approach necessary to make VR accepted as a ‘normal’ device by a lot of people…

We need a new technological approach and a new open source, globally accepted as a standard, format for VR and more generally for 3D if we want seeing it growing up.

Would I rather show an elementary student a picture of a dinosaur, a movie of a dinosaur, or have the student walk up to a dinosaur in a virtual world? Same question, when tigers are extinct I would rather enter a virtual world to see them.

No.. and it should not be, because people will keep isolating themselves from the real word and end up more lonely.

this link is useful

https://www.freedominthought.com/.../will-virtual-reality-replace-real...

regards

This is definitely a no. Despite the immersive power of virtual reality, there are many aspects of life that can not be perfectly replicated in VR.

I like your comparison of iVR devices to smartphones. I would expect the trend to be similar. Some people predicted that smartphones will push out personal computers, but it didn't happen. Over time smartphones became integral part of our daily lives, but we still use PC’s. Sure, some of the activities previously done on PC’s are now mainly done on smartphones, but smartphones also added new possibilities and activities. I expect iVR devices will become part of our daily lives for some of the activities which are now done on PC's or smartphones but will also add some new possibilities.

I am curious to know more about Semantic Lacks in virtual reality, can anyone help?

I Agree With Roger Seiler