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Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us? | The New Yorker

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Because we in Silicon Valley are newness junkies, it can feel like an act of sabotage to have memories, but, for better or worse, I have them. It’s been more than forty years since I co-founded the first company to make headsets and software for simulated experiences, and came up with familiar terms like virtual and mixed reality. Since then, virtual reality has flooded the public imagination in waves; back in the nineteen-eighties, for instance, it had quite a presence in movies, cartoons, TV shows, the occasional arcade game, and a few early consumer products, like the Nintendo Power Glove. I still love V.R. But, these days, I sense that what I experience of it, what I enjoy in it, is different from what it has come to mean to many enthusiasts. Back then, at the beginning, did I talk about V.R. like the people I disagree with now? Sometimes I did! I did occasionally promote V.R. as an alternate cosmos that might swallow us all to good effect. I don’t agree with that sort of talk now,

Save this story Save this story Because we in Silicon Valley are newness junkies, it can feel like an act of sabotage to have memories, but, for better or worse, I have them. It’s been more than forty years since I co-founded the first company to make headsets and software for simulated experiences, and came up with familiar terms like virtual and mixed reality. Since then, virtual reality has flooded the public imagination in waves; back in the nineteen-eighties, for instance, it had quite a presence in movies, cartoons, TV shows, the occasional arcade game, and a few early consumer products,

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