I spent a week working, exercising and relaxing in virtual reality. I?m shocked to say it finally works | Ed Newton-Rex
I?m writing this from a room that?s slowly orbiting the Earth. Behind the floating screen in front of me, through a giant opening where a wall should be, the planet slowly spins, so close that it takes up most of my field of vision. It?s morning in Australia to my right; India and the first hints of Europe are dotted with lights up and to my left. The soft drone of the air circulation system hums quietly behind me.
I spent a week doing everything that I could ? working, exercising, composing ? on my virtual reality headset. This was the year virtual reality threatened to go mainstream, with prices becoming more attainable and Apple entering the market, and so I wanted to see how far VR has come since I first tried it in the mid-2010s, when the main experiences on offer were nausea-inducing rollercoaster simulators. I used a recent model from Meta, called the Quest 3, and the conclusion was clear: this thing now works. It feels a little unfinished, but we?ve reached the point where VR could at last become genuinely useful.
The biggest surprise was working in VR. I cannot recommend this highly enough. Donning a headset, you can summon multiple screens, all connected to your computer, make them as large as you want, and place them anywhere in your environment. ?Passthrough? ? the ability to see digital objects superimposed on the real world, made possible with cameras built into the front of the headset ? means you can carve out a window from the virtual environment to see your keyboard. And you can choose between any number of environments to work in, from minimalist cafes to mountain lodges, switching between them at will. I?ve rapidly got to the stage where, if I?m working on my own, I?d rather work in virtual reality than in reality.
The main problem is a general lack of polish. The headset doesn?t quite feel like a finished product. It?s perhaps 10% too heavy, like a lab prototype that?s yet to be refined. The battery won?t get you through anything like an entire day. Every so often, the controllers disconnect without explanation. I took it on a plane to do some work, but the challenge of connecting it to my laptop using the in-flight wifi proved insurmountable.
But watching a film in VR during the flight was nothing short of extraordinary. Yes, I felt a very British need to apologise to my neighbour ? wearing a headset in public hasn?t yet reached socially acceptable status. As soon as I hit play, though, I knew it would be difficult ever to go back to in-flight entertainment. I was sitting in a cinema, lights dimmed, a few tiered rows of seats separating me from a huge screen on a virtual wall. In long spells without turbulence, I genuinely forgot we were flying. If there was one downside, it?s that I was so immersed that I nearly missed the breakfast cart coming past.
View image in fullscreen ?Today, the key to making the most of VR ? if you?re not a gamer ? is using it for activities you do on your own.? Photograph: Marissa Leshnov/The Guardian
The cinema, of course, was empty apart from me ? by design. Other apps are not so intentionally sparsely populated. I downloaded one that promised live virtual concerts. Entering the virtual lobby, I found there were no concerts on, nor sign of any planned. No matter: it also offered a space where you could socialise when no acts were playing. I loaded it up. It was a beautifully designed virtual world, all domes and arches and curving ramps. But it was a ghost town. I was the only one there. And this is an app that the internet thinks is one of the most popular for live music.
When people think of VR, they often picture Ready Player One, the sci-fi novel and film about a world in which people spend most of their time in a shared virtual reality: congregating there as avatars, mixing, talking, watching sports or music together. This feels a long way off. There are games that give hints of this collective experience, such as Gorilla Tag, where kids congregate after school and play tag as a gorilla, chatting to each other and swinging their arms to move. But VR adoption just isn?t broad enough yet for the Ready Player One vision to become reality. Today, the key to making the most of VR ? if you?re not a gamer ? is using it for activities you do on your own.
Work, at least for a certain kind of knowledge worker, is one such activity ? and one that someone deeply embedded in the industry recently told me they?re seeing as the fastest-growing use-case. It feels easier to be productive in VR. The clutter of your office is gone, replaced by whichever calming environment takes your fancy that day. Monitors that in the real world would cost thousands of dollars appear before you on demand. As a place to sit at my keyboard and write music, a virtual forest in the mountains is infinitely preferable to the grey walls of my study. All distractions recede from view.
Another is exercise. I had a personal training session in my garden, a virtual trainer hovering in the air in front of me. Passthrough, which was only added to the Quest recently, is critical here, since it means you can use weights ? not a sensible idea on previous models that completely obscured the real world. It seems reasonable to hope that on-demand personal training in my home might get me regularly exercising where so many fleeting gym memberships have failed.
The launch of Apple?s Vision Pro headset earlier this year was meant to be the starting gun for VR. It wasn?t. It is an engineering marvel, magical to use ? but it doesn?t yet have enough compelling apps, and the ?3,500 price tag rules it out for most people. Stories of headsets gathering dust or being returned have led some to think VR is little more than another hype bubble from a tech industry desperate to find the next big thing.
But VR is not hype. There are kinks to smooth out, sure. But I think we?ve hit a tipping point. If you embrace it as something single-player ? and something you?re not going to be using much in public ? it is genuinely useful. Work, entertainment, exercise ? all are fantastic in VR already. Don?t count on small, rectangular screens being how humanity communicates with machines for ever.
