Why is Virtual Reality Misunderstood: Understanding VR
Virtual Reality is misunderstood these days and that’s the result of a lot of different factors and how they impacted the mainstream opinion and their perceived notion of VR.
Having said that, we thought about going over all of these different variables and how they affect the way people everywhere misinterpret Virtual Reality.
We go over some of the most impactful variables like how VR was rushed too soon, how there were some worries about the potential applications of the technology, how there were virtually – pun intended – no health studies done on the topic and how the word was misused to describe other tech experiences.
On the other hand, we also touch how the lack of mainsteam devices damaged VR’s diffusion and how corporate abuse or privacy concerns conditioned the way investors saw this technology.
Virtual Reality Was Rushed and Born Too Soon:
We all remember the awkward days in which Virtual Reality was officially born.
If you don’t and you’re too young to, then know we mostly had the first contact with VR in technology fairs in which a VR Rig was present and showed you a bunch of colors and shapes in a very strange way.
Every piece of technology starts off rough, but VR started extra rough because it has hastened by the pop culture references to it nearly everywhere.
People just wanted VR so badly they didn’t even worry about the fact that there simply wasn’t enough technology to pull that off.
Unfortunate, it was such a gimmick that most people still remember VR as those strange shapes and colors with no real use, and this hurts public perception.
Worries About the Applications of Virtual Reality:
Virtual Reality is a powerful tool, but it’s not easy to incorporate it in every niche, and though its use can produce results that blast any other media out of the pond, correct application of the technology requires a higher than average creativity and some thinking outside the box.
Because of this, less creative markets worry about the applications of virtual reality in the real world, and the noise these less creative people generate can spook some investors who were otherwise willing to bet into this technology.
Lack of Medical Studies on the Effects of Virtual Reality in the Brain:
This was one of the biggest reasons VR was misenterpreted.
There is unfortunately a very real percentage of people who get motion sickness due to the use of virtual reality headsets, and there’s that myth that having your eyes too close to the screen can burn them.
These factors allied with some others bring a lot of health concerns for a lot of people and the fact that this is a relativelly new technology means that there aren’t enough medical studies done to ease those concerns.
This makes it so people constantly point out there’s not enough conclusive research on VR’s impact on the brain and eyesight, and this trend will continue until more studies are made and divulged.
Misuse of the Word to Describe Other Digital Experiences:
This one is a rare event that still happens.
There was a time in which using VR to describe gimmick visual experiences was normal, and fortunately this is something that is decreasing as time goes by and people learn about what VR really is.
On the other hand, it still happens that some visual experiences are described as virtual reality when they are no more than visual effects or sometimes even Augmented Reality being misinterpreted.
Lack of Mainstream Devices When They Were Most Needed:
A self explanatory variable that you know to be true as Virtual Reality headsets are still far from being in nearly every house with a computer system or console, and are still considered to be a novelty.
This makes it so the expansion of VR adoption is slower than it should be if the market had the correct peripherals.
Worries on Corporate Abuse or Privacy Concerns:
When Virtual Reality was revealed in all its glory to the mainstream world, you had two sides of the same coin.
Corporations and CEOs everywhere said:
- Nice, advertising everywhere!
While regular people and ethics regulators said:
- Oh no, advertising everywhere!
Granted, privacy concerns and corporate abuse are something to be expected, but with a technology that has the power to transform and customize everyone’s world those worries are tenfold.
There are a lot of people getting VR as a dangerous development because they greatly overestimate the damage that can be done with the technology – but this is something that happened with the internet itself, or with cryptocurrency as well.
These are all normal developments we should expect when a new world changing technology comes out, and can be interpreted as a pain that comes from natural organic growth.
On the other hand, we’re pretty sure that as technology progresses and VR gains more adoption, that virtual reality will stop being misinterpreted and will have a place in every household.