Media in the VR Era: Reality and Virtuality, the Real and the Illusory
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Since the communication theorist Marshall McLuhan proposed the idea that "the medium is the message" last century, inspiring people to re-examine "media," generations have continuously explored the impact of "new media" such as text, radio, television, and mobile phones on human society.
Now, as VR (along with its "close relatives" AR and MR) re-enters the public eye after several ups and downs, let's discuss what messages the media of the VR era bring us.
First, let's review the characteristics of various media throughout history and the new dimensions of communication they introduced, or what McLuhan called "messages."
01 Books
According to Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, books are arguably the best medium for the transmission of human wisdom. They are concise, restrained, and well-organized, tirelessly condensing the essence of thought with the aid of printing technology, using precise wording and grammatical structures to ensure unambiguous understanding by future generations.
From the author writing the book to the reader reading it, knowledge is encoded and then decoded, completing the transmission. This characteristic of books even influences people's oral expressions, vividly making "spoken language literary," as if conversations were like "listening to a book."
Imagine such an era—everyone is scholarly, carefully considering their words before discussing issues, striving for rigor and effectiveness in speech, truly like the phrase "words as brilliant as lotus flowers," with golden stars popping out between sentences.
02 Newspapers
Newspapers, as a medium, brought the world beyond an individual's control right to their doorstep. Reading was no longer about carefully selected themes or coherent thoughts but became the passive reception of fragmented information.
This new dimension caused an explosion in the amount of information individuals could access in their daily lives, like a sapling surviving on dew suddenly transplanted into fertile farmland.
People eagerly absorbed these fresh, abundant informational nutrients, while "knowledge" became something to "know" rather than something to "understand" after deep thought.
03 Radio
With the advent of the radio era, human media gained a new dimension—sound. Compared to the effort required to learn written language, understanding spoken words is almost effortless. Thus, radio's long-distance transmission not only enriched the information available but also made it easier to comprehend.
Listening to the radio with closed eyes or while doing other tasks, this visual-free medium gave us the illusion of "multitasking" at any time, increasing the amount of information humans could receive simultaneously.
04 Television
In the television era, lamented by Postman, the "image revolution" perfectly unified vision and sound. The sapling planted in the farmland was now thrown into a small pond. People were mesmerized by endless moving, jumping, colorful, and sound-filled images on a small screen, immersed in scenes that may or may not exist in the real world.
By this time, people rarely engaged in lengthy conversations, and the golden stars that once sparkled on their tongues gradually faded.
05 Computers
With another leap in time, computers and the internet plunged the sapling in the pond into a rushing river. Countless pieces of information generated incessantly were linked to people searching for information incessantly. Gradually, people began to believe that what couldn't be found in a search engine didn't exist, and what everyone agreed on in search results was the truth.
People's dependence on information was like a person without a digestive system—eating without absorbing, immediately excreting, and to compensate for the eternal emptiness in their stomachs, they indiscriminately consumed whatever "food" was in front of them.
06 Mobile Phones
As computers grew smaller, small enough to hold in one hand, the "hand" in mobile phones brought even more information.
On one hand, the "mobile hand" allowed information to follow people like a shadow, summoned anytime, anywhere. On the other hand, the "moving hand" added more dimensions and layers to the interaction between people and information. Gradually, mobile phones became our second brain for acquiring information, our second vocal cords for expressing emotions, and our second self for discovering preferences.
Looking back, each media revolution increased the amount of information individuals could access, enriched the forms of information, and made interpersonal communication freer.
The evolution of media is sprinting irreversibly toward "communication at presence."
However, achieving true "communication at presence" requires meeting many conditions. Think about our experiences communicating with others in real life: it requires being in the same time, specific location, and environmental space, receiving and transmitting thoughts without delay, while also perceiving and influencing the other person and the objective environment.
Under such conditions, we are time-synchronized (time), context-consistent (context), and deeply engaged (participation), thus achieving the deepest immersion.
07 VR
Now, let's see what the media of the VR era aims to bring us.
The components of VR are panoramic vision + interactive content (content or context). No matter how VR headsets evolve or how oddly shaped VR controllers become, they aim to maximally replicate the human experience of full-field, instantaneous, retina-resolution vision, as well as the muscle experience and muscle memory of all tactile sensory organs.
If this replication is realistic enough, the human brain will believe in its authenticity.
Imagine two people conversing in such a VR world, each wearing their avatar, standing on a small asteroid in Saturn's rings, discussing one person's recent heartbreak:
You can see the other person's lip movements while hearing the corresponding sounds in your ears. The rise and fall of her chest and abdomen as she breathes is transmitted through the bright yellow silk camisole she's wearing.
As your gaze wanders, Jupiter eclipses the sun, casting a brief shadow over your tiny asteroid. When you look back at her, she's at the saddest part of her story, a tear slowly forming at the corner of her eye. With a toss of her head, the tear floats away, suspended in the air, reflecting her image.
Hey, at this point, what reason do you have not to rush over and hug her, telling her everything will be okay with you there?
But in reality, you'd only be hugging thin air.
This is the new "communication at presence" that VR will bring us. Because vision is easier to replicate than touch, in such interactions, we gradually accept the unreality of bodily sensations, shifting more brainpower to processing dazzling visual information, neglecting bodily perceptions, and even forgetting muscle memory from the real world, instead accepting the sensations from the controller as real touch.
"What you see is what you get"—we have finally become true "visual animals."
Visuals = Reality.