Is VR really the future? New book warns against hype from tech overlords

For several years now, Meta, Apple, and other tech giants have been hyping up the wonders of virtual reality (VR). But the revolution isn’t coming, and a new book explains why utopian promises are far from reality – and could even be dangerous.

Remember the Apple Vision Pro? Thought so. No one is talking about it – except, of course, Apple, which is still publishing uninspiring press releases.

In a way, that was to be expected. Most consumers were always more likely to simply try out the shiny new AR/VR headset – and then give it back to the store clerk. $3499 is a lot of money.

There’s still no killer app on visionOS, the Vision Pro’s operating system. It’s bulky, heavy, and battery life is short.

What is real and what is plain fantasy

The hype lasted only a few weeks. By March 2024, the nerds, the journos, and the insiders had stopped chatting about these mysterious “immersive experiences.”

Unsurprisingly, IDC, a global market intelligence firm, said in the summer that Apple will probably sell fewer than 500,000 Vision Pro headsets this year.

The tech giant could introduce a cheaper version, but when did it come to anything? So far, it seems that the Vision Pro is on the road to ruin – even though Apple will, of course, survive.

And yes, perhaps it’s too early to state that the mass adoption of VR, mixed reality, spatial computing, or whatever is not making – or going to make – any headway.

However, Meta’s Quest devices are selling well, better than expected, according to Mark Zuckerberg, the metaverse's spokesman. Prices of the Meta Quest 3 headset start at just $299, and that’s certainly attractive.

Still, a couple of million units is not much compared to laptops, consoles, and especially smartphones. Besides, Reality Labs' revenue – this is where Quests are made – for Q2 of 2024 was $353 million, while expenses reached $4.8 billion. A lot of cash is burning.

Then again, the World Economic Forum predicted nearly a year ago that the metaverse market could be worth between $6-13 trillion by 2030, and large companies keep pouring investments into it.

Clearly, something’s not right. The billions are spent, and the gadgets are released amidst lots of admiration, but the problem child – the consumer – is still unconvinced. As the sad sales numbers reveal, the craze is mostly artificially boosted with the help of slick press releases and an army of influencers.

This is where Fantasies of Virtual Reality: Untangling Fiction, Fact, and Threat, a new book by Marcus Carter and Ben Egliston, both academics at the University of Sydney, stretches out a helping hand.

Although the book is not an easy read by any possible measurement, it’s really essential reading for anyone interested in what VR can really do – and what is just plain fantasy.

Here’s something amazing – but take it off in 30 minutes

Probably most importantly, Carter and Egliston do a great job – it’s academic English so it’s a bit of a slog – in questioning the tech industry’s vision of a bright future where immersive VR experiences will dominate.

“Debunking” would be too strong a word – but they’re certainly throwing down a gauntlet to utopian narratives thrown our way daily by big tech.

Here’s, though, a lament that a book like this will never become a bestseller. But maybe a few tech enthusiasts will manage to see through the overhype machine and sense the dangers coming our way – in policing and the military but also in being judged at work, for example.

They promise us miracles in fields such as education, health, and, of course, communication when, actually, we might do well to lower our expectations surrounding AI and pay more attention to issues like privacy or control.

At the risk of repeating myself, I will again say that there’s a lot of money involved. The amount of money, for instance, that Zuckerbeg’s Meta is spending to make his metaverse a reality each year is roughly equivalent to an entire year’s research and development expenditure of businesses in Australia – and this is a rich country.

Gaming? Revolution. Education and health? Revolution. Police work? More empathetic. Military? More precise and ruthless – and yet empathetic. The promises, indeed, sound very cute.

But we’ve heard all about technology changing the world before – Facebook was supposed to topple dictators, and Twitter, now X and declining, was to become an energetic virtual town square, right?

“There is nothing truly virtual about virtual reality: VR is deeply entrenched in the material world, driven by tangible technological, economic, and social logics,” the authors of the book point out.

There are technological limitations, sexism and exclusion are actually built into VR’s design, and there are – obviously – more opportunities than ever to collect our data. In short, it’s not actually fantastic as such.

VR indeed often leads to motion sickness because it tricks the sensors of the body to make it feel like you’re actually in the virtual environment.

The sensation is amazing, but there’s a reason it’s not recommended to use the gadget for more than half an hour at a time – our bodies begin assuming we’ve been poisoned and decide to vomit up the poison.

An exercise in tone-deafness

But if you read the media, everything’s fine, and we’re really on the precipice of widespread adoption of VR – even if we haven’t really moved forward for nearly a decade. Why? Carter and Egliston are disappointed.

Throughout the book, one can feel the frustration with the uncritical treatment of VR in tech journalism and even academia. VR was actually very rarely discussed before Zuckerberg’s rebrand, the authors say.

In fact, there’s a significant difference in how widely analyzed and critiqued other emerging technologies like AI or crypto are. But it might have something to do with the idea that VR has always been viewed as a gaming and entertainment technology for dudes rather than a serious one with the potential for far-reaching impacts upon society.

“This is, unfortunately, false. Each generation of VR has expanded the amount of data that it collects about the user and their environment, and the potential deployments of VR in workplaces, in schools, and by the military have the potential for far-reaching harms,” say Carter and Egliston.

By the way, yes, VR is for dudes because women are simply not being envisioned as users of the system. They experience motion sickness more and are much more often sexually harassed. One female user wrote: “The virtual groping feels just as real.”

And VR apostles – such as Zuckerberg whose goal back in 2017 was to reach one billion users in VR within the next ten years (nope) – can be really tone-deaf in promoting this virtual awesomeness.

Each generation of VR has expanded the amount of data that it collects about the user and their environment, and the potential deployments of VR in workplaces, in schools, and by the military have the potential for far-reaching harms,”

Marcus Carter and Ben Egliston.

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Maria that killed nearly 3,000 people in Puerto Rico, Zuckerberg arranged a ridiculous live-stream, soon dubbed “part disaster tourism, part product promotion.”

He sought to demonstrate the features of Facebook Spaces (a short-lived social VR tool) and “teleported” to a 360-degree video that NPR had released to convey the damage in Puerto Rico and surrounding islands.

Zuckerbeg’s avatar invites viewers to just look around – there’s still flooding and everything is destroyed – and then moves on: “This is one of the things that is really magical about virtual reality, is that you can get the feel that you’re really in a place.”

Meta’s boss soon apologized for this tasteless and humiliating endeavor, but the idea that whatever empathy VR can strengthen will probably be fake and classist is here to stay.

In short, the simulated reality will keep humanity distracted – and maybe that’s the whole point. The business model of big social media firms is already centered around surveillance and masked as harmless fun – VR will only boost it.