How Virtual Reality is the Future of Travel

Image source: www.vr-gaming.co.uk

In the future, when your friend wants to show you pictures of their trip to Paris, you won’t huddle around their phone to flick through lifeless, 2D pictures of landmarks and landscapes. You’ll don a VR headset and open your eyes to find yourself standing in front of the Notre-Dame. You’ll turn around and see the other tourists gawking at it. You’ll walk through the cathedral, just as your friend did when they were there.

While a lot of Virtual Reality speculation and ideas are focused solely on digital worlds or video games, those ideas ignore the reality that’s around us all the time. Skip the hard math problems of simulation: particles, wind, and water. These are easy to fake, but difficult to create an illusion of chaos that permeates the physical world around us.

With Virtual Reality right around the corner, what is it poised to change in the world?

What if you skipped the simulation and jumped right into simply projecting reality itself? Google’s 3D VR Jump is already being produced in small numbers, virtual reality-TV shows are being produced, and Marriott is creating postcards (more like advertisements) that appear to teleport the viewer to another location entirely.

Virtual Reality has the potential to completely transform how we interact with the world in a new and powerful way. It’s similar to photography, which suddenly enabled people from all over the world to grasp and visualize the world that was closed off without experience. If you couldn’t leave your town, that’s all you’d ever see. There’s another, often forgotten, use of photography: sharing paintings.

Consider the idea of paintings before the advent of photography. If you wanted to write about them, you’d have to either write for people who had seen the painting in particular, or hopefully, describe it adequately enough to get the idea across.

Photography suddenly allowed unlimited reproductions of paintings that were previously unavailable. More people were exposed to art than ever before, and it helped that kind of culture spread like wildfire.

You can apply this kind of proliferation to a ton of technological advances in the last hundred years: home movie releases let previously one-shot experiences be enjoyed again and again, same for music recordings.

Photography’s inherent limits have always been focused on its inability to really capture the same feeling or emotion of a memory. While VR wouldn’t be able to replicate that, it’ll get a lot closer than before. Walking through the distillation of a memory will be a lot more powerful and evocative than staring at a picture.

Virtual reality can be rehabilitative, too. By creating controlled environments, it can help the injured or sick become reacquainted with their world, or safely confront psychological fears. It can help people in physical therapy be more engaged and willingly to work through their training. If someone is unable to be visited by family members, they can more authentically recreate that intimacy with a virtual representation.

Furthermore, the same idea can be applied to telecommuting. Many people work away from the office, and while they enjoy the perks of not necessarily having to get dressed, they miss out on office culture or social aspects of having a job.

If telecommuters could have a virtual presence in an office, it could help employees connect and create better relationships and boost office morale.

Virtual reality stands to change a lot about how we interact with our world and each other. While a lot of naysayers will complain that it’ll make people more isolated, I think that ignores the progress of any immersive tech. It isn’t a gimmick, it’s a real change.

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