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VR Impact Dating

Where are we going?

By Musing AroundPublished 4 years ago 6 min read
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VR Impact Dating - Opinion Piece

The world has expanded rapidly beyond the six square blocks that we kicked around back in 1980-something. There was a time, between the age of Pac Man and the Nintendo Zelda craze, that we found our friends’ location by riding around the neighborhood and counting how many bikes were stacked outside a house. The internet’s dominion over distance brought what was once on the other side of the globe into the close proximity of our living rooms. We chatted with people thousands of miles away, sharing experiences and cultures. After just a few agonizing minutes of AOL ‘dial up’, the painful yet welcoming growls and grinds still resonate fresh in my mind as fiberoptic foreplay, we were transported to a world much larger than our own. Within the span of a decade after it’s introduction, online social networking has cast it’s net over the globe and social currency is the weigh and measure of the minutest details of our lives. We share our stories, political rants, pictures of food and ‘follow’ each other faithfully, promptly hitting the corresponding emojis and thumbs up. The world, once thought of as disconnected and vast, has become smaller, a living fabric of social quilting entirely at our fingertips. The world has become so small in fact that evolution has occurred yet again and we are able to create our own. Virtual Reality (VR) is poised to weave itself into every fiber of our world-wide communities.

Virtual Reality has been featured in SciFi movies such as Total Recall (1990). People in this futuristic society were too busy to take vacations and were conveniently implanted with a ‘virtual experience’ to make it seem has though they had actually been there. Another view on VR experience was in Ready Player One (2018) where you were able to immerse yourself into a virtually created world to escape the vile, desolate state that the real world was in. Both great movies and plausible futuristic examples of what I thought VR would eventually grow into becoming. Something big, something grandiose, something in the future beyond my lifetime. It wasn’t until recently while creating an app, that I discovered how subtle, significant and consequential VR already is.

The commonality between these movies and what most people think of when they think of VR experience, is that you are physically linked or immersed in the virtual reality realm to experience it. This is where most experiences in VR today fall short or are ill-equipped to hold up to those movie standards. What about the social immersion link to VR, such as VR dating? Imagine that you could pick a customizable avatar on your mobile device and through your mental link with that avatar, enter into a world that allows your mind to go to a club and mingle with friends, go to a movie with that special someone’s avatar, pick a museum or tourist attraction that you both want to see and take a tour, sit on the moon and have a picnic looking at the earth – with today’s technology, all of this is possible to share with someone that lives thousands of miles away, and they don’t even have to speak your language. The old saying ‘there are plenty of fish in the sea’ becomes ‘there are endless stars in the universe’! Are these experiences any less real because they are based in a ‘social’ immersion of VR and not necessarily a ‘physical’ immersion? The landscape becomes less important than the experience of nurturing the intimate, emotional attachment to those that you connect with through the power of VR, but it is the shared experiences you have in VR that act as fodder for the attraction. Is this enough to elevate your FaceBook page to ‘In A Relationship’? The setting may be created; however, the matters of the heart are defined only by the one that it beats within.

There can be a beauty in the simplicity model of social immersions. VR dating is perfect for career-focused individuals who want encounters when they have time for them. It doesn’t get the sheets messy and there are no awkward silences waiting for their taxi ride home. For others, the anonymity of an avatar allows them to open up more than they would in person or to approach people they may never have approached in real life. If you don’t hit it off with someone on a blind date, you are not trapped, you simply unplug. With the endless places to go and things to do, if you are a person of limited means, you would be able to take your date to virtual places and experience things that you would not be able to entertain in real life. If you met ‘the one’ you could have a VR wedding where the entire family of 500 could attend, open bar. What if you meet two Ms./Mr. Rights? Is there polygamy in VR? Will we see articles in Cosmopolitan magazine detailing ‘Ten Ways to Keep Your VR Man’? Complexity enters the equation.

Social, ethical and moral guidance isn’t easily established in VR. There are basic Oculus codes of conduct; however, those are concerns addressed by game developers for the most part. You can report offensive behavior and material as well as threats as defined by these rules, but, is polygamy a threat? Is dating ten people at once an offense? Or is it a misunderstanding or a difference in perspective? There are people from several different countries, cultures and beliefs thrown into one area of general population. People want the safety of conformity to societal laws. But what laws? The state you live in? The country they live in? Is there Judge Judy in VR? If VR is not real, but your feelings are, are you owed restitution for the injustice of your experience? How do you measure such a thing? Does this give you the right to sue? The possibility for you to be sued if you were unaware you broke someone’s heart? To be banned? To lose your social currency?

The ‘social’ immersion experience of VR dating can become tangled in very real-world consequences. The experience of VR intrusion was not easy to identify as it was in the previously mentioned movies. No implant, no body devices to put on – it was far more subtle and available than that. It was nothing more than a devoted mental state. I was astonished at the fast implications that VR can saturate real life with and the multitude of unanswered questions and unexplored territory that remains to be ventured into. I have brought forward a small taste of what may lie ahead. Once on the lips, forever on the hips. The more VR saturates everyday life, the more we engage with it to seek out emotional gratification or to escape a world we live in, the more likely it becomes the world we live in will change its code of conduct to react to what has taken place in VR. Laws are unfortunately extremely reactive, not proactive - it will be VR shaping us, not the other way around. Virtual Realty will literally shape our reality. Ironic, isn’t it? It’s impossible to have the foresight to know what guidelines need to be set, how to police and enforce these guidelines and how to protect society at large without suffocating innovation. It is my hope that with an abundance of tolerance, a sense of responsibility and the bravery to allow pioneering in a new arena, VR will bring with it the possibility to forge meaningful friendships, diverse networks and strength in communication for humanity as a whole to build a better reality.

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About the Creator

Musing Around

Articles authored here exhibit Satirical Editorial Prowess- unfiltered. You may find them thought-provoking, offensive, or slightly arousing. Side effects: Riveting debate and a heightened sense of humor.

@musingaroundlv

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