The Metaverse Might Just Fry Your Brain

Virtual reality has side effects that can have long(er) term consequences

What interests me most on Twitter is when I see the connections among things that get me fired up. When I see those things, I want to share, so I’ve decided I will. Here. Follow me if you dare.

Mathew Ingram recently tweeted about his reaction to virtual reality (VR). I’m only an observer of VR, but it does come up a lot in the work I do for Silicon Valley. Seems everyone is building their field of dreams with VR, AI (artificial intelligence), and machine learning (ML). I’m sure I can find more acronyms if this is fun for you; we survive on them like water.

It's called cybersickness, and it sounds incredibly unpleasant.

The issue seems to be two-fold: one is the idea that your perception is being changed, and those of us who have peripheral vision sensitivity can be bothered by what happens when you enter the VR. If you haven’t experienced it, good for you. But that could change based on a new twist.

As Mathew explains, the twist comes from how technology is advancing. In the old days — like 2020 — the processing power for the experience was, let’s say, bulky. And in the Valley, we are all about making things cheaper, faster, and replicable. As that happens in VR, compromises, er um, “tradeoffs” are being made, impacting the end-user experience.

The issue is actually something of a catch-22: In order to make VR more accessible and affordable, companies are making devices smaller and running them on less powerful processors. But these changes introduce dizzying graphics — which inevitably causes more people to experience cybersickness. read more

His article is fascinating and worth the read. And my brain instantly connected it to a tweet sent by Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy about his recent visit to Silicon Valley. First, glad he came out and spent time in our weird world. Second, his observations were fascinating.