nicetriangle
Some people call VR dystopian, but it’s got great potential too.
During COVID while I was living alone and we were under lockdown…
I used a Quest to watch movies in a virtual theater with a bunch of people from around the world. I remember being in a theater watching an absolutely ridiculous Nicolas Cage movie laughing my ass off with a bunch of dudes from Australia. Another time I watched a cricket game with some people who explained the rules to me and kinda gave me some play by play on what was happening.
I’ve also attended a few support group meetings in VR for coping with loss that had quite a lot of attendants. The meeting was run by a licensed group therapist and we took turns sharing and then reflecting on each others stories. It was frankly amazing.
I also played mini golf with friends of mine as well as had a couple meetings over a round of mini golf with the other guy on my design team during lockdown. Honestly the best virtual meetings I ever had.
All of the above were very social and very positive experience. I didn’t feel far away from people, I felt connected to them.
Same way a smartphone can be a useful tool that enhances your life or a screen you stare at for hours consuming bullshit TikTok videos. You’re in control of what you make of it. You can also stick to a dumb phone and not participate at all.
Damn that is not something you read in the news every day. Pretty insane.
For my particular niche (illustration) it has a way better concentration of active (and also importantly) high quality actual working professional artists on it than mastodon.
The art scene on mastodon is pretty meh and the largest art centric instance is run by unstable authoritarians that are some of the biggest sources of drama on mastodon.
Yeah I’m just not sure how much I believe this thing is worth the investment at all and the fact that it’s 100km just proves these guys were like “uhhh, let’s make it BIG NUMBER KM LONG.”
I think there’s likely quite a lot of other worthier expenditures in science research than this indulgent toy.