Imagine you step out onto the wooden plank 100 stories above the pavement. Feel the thrill and the drop of your stomach as the board creaks while you step forward. That unsettling feeling is exactly how I felt while playing “Richie’s Plank Experience,” a virtual reality game where you enter an elevator and exit on a wooden plank incredibly high up from the ground. This unique ability to create such a realistic feeling is through virtual reality. These virtual reality experiences have revolutionized the way we interact with technology.

It’s impossible to fathom extended reality in a century, let alone 10 years. The possibilities are endless. Future generations might become accustomed to daily XR usage; perhaps they’ll be living in a primarily augmented world. There are certainly good things to come out of this: the freedom and creativity derived from an augmented/virtual reality is extensive and truly liberating. However, we may find ourselves in a dark place if we don’t focus on XR’s issues at hand.

The world around us is constantly evolving. In the past, people hypothesized that we’d have flying cars, hoverboards, and interplanetary travel. Although some hypotheses about the world of the future ended up being fulfilled, not many could have ever predicted that humanity would expand into the virtual world.

The creation of virtual reality (VR) is a compelling story that embodies dedication, innovation, and imagination. It began in the 1950s when Morton Heilig first envisioned a multi-sensory theater, followed by Ivan Sutherland's invention of the very first head-mounted display in 1968. These early developments laid down essential foundations for VR which combined various fields including science, technology, and art. Through the 1980s and 1990s, VR gained attention from the digital revolution and advancements in computer graphics.

Just a few months ago, I had the opportunity to gain first hand experience with VR. The experience was pretty cool – until it wasn’t. After going through the basic orientation on the headset, I began to use Google Earth to locate my home town. Within seconds (in reality it was 5-10 minutes of being in VR) I was hit with a wave of nausea that just would not leave. The more I wandered in VR, the worse I felt, until I couldn’t take it anymore and had to remove the headset.

Virtual reality is an imitation of the real world environment through technology.

The first time I put on a VR headset a few years ago was the first time I truly understood that seeing is believing. An entire new world opened up in my living room, and I perceived the virtual objects and boundaries as real, physical things. But even though my brain wanted to accept the virtual world in front of me, I couldn’t touch what I saw. This disconnect had led me to ponder these questions: was the virtual world in front of me real? What makes something real?

The Open Education Resources (OER) Working Group of the River Campus Libraries (RCL) is working toward its fourth year of an Open Education grant program and has identified more low-cost/increased-access champions across campus. This year, we are proud to announce 8 new Zero-Cost Heroes.

Sanjeel Parekh is a research scientist at Meta Reality Labs Research. His research primarily focuses on building machine learning tools for problems involving audio-visual data such as source separation, event detection, and speech enhancement. 

He earned his PhD in computer science at Technicolor and Telecom University of Paris-Saclay in 2019. His thesis was on learning representations for robust audio-visual scene analysis. Other areas he finds interesting and engaging are multimedia and ML research, music, philosophy, math, and machines. 

Dr. Synatra Smith is a cultural anthropologist exploring extended reality (XR) and other digital tools to enhance special collections and archival records featuring African American art, history, and culture with the specific intention of documenting workflows that can be shared with students, cultural heritage workers, and scholars interested in building digital projects without relying on a large budget or team. She sits at the intersection of researcher; gallery, library, archives, and museum (GLAM) professional; and digital humanities practitioner.