The New York Times describes a modern wedding taking place in virtual reality. But should we normalize such departures from the real world?
The world’s biggest companies are rushing to develop their own versions of the “meta” or “metaverse”. Think of it like you would have thought of the internet in the early nineties. At that time, the internet was a rudimentary mishmash of independent nerds and companies throwing up little more than splash page websites with crude hyperlinks and repeating background images. To get sound to play on a site was a big deal. Of course, you had to hope that the user had a sound card installed so that they could even play it. They called them “sound blasters” back then… it made geeks feel cool when they spent big bucks to have their computer play brief clips of audio.
That’s where the “metaverse” is at the moment. The graphics are laughable, for the most part. The Oculus Quest 2 is the headset most people are using, and although its amazing in many ways, having everything self-contained inside the headset has drawbacks. There are now wires to keep you in place like a modern-day Pinocchio, but the graphics take a ten year hit as a result. With the headset on, the user isn’t receiving images like they can on an Xbox Series X or a Playstation 5. It’s more like what your phone is capable of doing. That’s not terrible, and there are clever ways for video game artists to get around the limitations, but we’re not yet at mainstream, realistic graphics on the headsets.
But that day is coming, and it may be sooner than you think.
What are we going to do when the “metaverse”, a term that refers to a man-made universe beyond our current universe, is hyper-realstic? What are we going to do when touch is mainstream? How will this transform the world, the human experience, and will it be of overall benefit to leave our reality for a different kind of experience on a daily basis?
You might think all of this is far-off science fiction. It’s not. Within years, perhaps a decade at the longest, a powerful graphics machine is likely to stream very realistic virtual reality into the eyes of anyone who wants it. That might be a next, next generation console, it might be a gaming PC, or it might be a something wholly new. The headsets that we use today will look like Gameboy bricks of the eighties. Instead of blocks strapped to our faces, the future VR headsets might look like sleek goggles with computation offloaded to a wireless system somewhere else in the office or house. Already, programs like Tilt Brush have revolutionized art design by allowing artists to enter a virtual space… how long until other areas of life are transformed, and how long until all of it is mainstream?
Yet the dangers of virtual reality, of this “metaverse”, this internet of worlds, are far greater than what we even faced with the advent of the internet. When the internet was invented, did we realize that the way humanity interacts with sexuality would forever be changed? Thousands of years of how humans related with sex was altered in a decade. When the internet was invented, did we realize that it would change literally everything we know about song distribution, movie distribution, entertainment distribution, and more? We couldn’t have even imagined “cloud computing”! And what would we have thought about the total reconfiguring of the marketplace by companies like Amazon? Who knew that social media would be used to control worldwide narratives and political movements. We didn’t even know what social media was.
What will the metaverse become? Will it be the matrix? Will it fizzle out? Nobody knows for sure, but we had better tread carefully. Romantic encounters with CGI characters that go beyond what can be experienced in reality could impact humanity in ways we don’t understand. Small children entering a virtual space and staying there more than they stay in the real world is something that makes playing too many video games pale in comparison. Remember when your grandmother told you to move away from the TV screen? Kids will be entering the TV screen.
That’s why when I read articles about people having a wedding ceremony in virtual reality, I think we’d better be very careful. Very careful. It’s weird and cute in a kooky way now, but it won’t always be that way. Perhaps it would be wise for us now to start stigmatizing the virtual space, the metaverse, if it used as a substitution for deeply meaningful events in life. If you want to become Mario in a fun play world or you want to conference with others from across continents, okay. But when it comes to your wedding ceremony, perhaps it would be wise to be in a real structure, build by real people, crafted from real resources… not a VR artist who quit Pixar a year ago to join a startup company. If we think ourselves so smart as to throw away real world experiences for cartoon-like virtual worlds now, what will happen when the virtual worlds are better than where we truly live?
“Traci and Dave Gagnon met in the cloud, so it only made sense that their wedding took place in it. On Labor Day weekend, the couple — or rather, their digital avatars — held a ceremony staged by Virbela, a company that builds virtual environments for work, learning and events.” — Steven Kurutz, New York Times
All this to say, don’t get get married in the metaverse. Don’t have babies in the metaverse. Don’t put your babies in the metaverse.
A revolution of technology and reality is coming. It’s coming soon, and the internet, streaming, video games, they’ll all seem rudimentary and childish in comparison. As we prepare to enter that revolution, let’s think very hard about every step we take. After all, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle once we’re there. I’m no Luddite, and virtual reality can be used for incredible good. But if you think about all the mistakes we made with the internet, it would be nice to not make naive mistakes again as something much more powerful is coming our way within a generation.
