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virtual reality

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entheogenic-gnosis

Rising Star
In the 1990s there was a lot a buzz around VR, though in the end it seemed to be a dead end venture.

Modern technologies are now venturing into realms involving virtual reality, and I was curious, are these new technologies beginning to live up to the expectations of VRs early days?

This was the one area that terence mckenna ventured into that I felt was a total miss...

... until recent VR technologies started to become popular, could these new technologies be the first steps into inventing a form of VR that's worthy of the name?

...something that would at least be recognizable as the first steps into mckennas VR dream?

I have not had a chance to personally explore any modern VR technology, and it may just be another gimmick leading to a dead end, but the potential to realize some pretty amazing things comes with the prospect of a revival in interest in generating virtual realities...

-eg
 
are these new technologies beginning to live up to the expectations of VRs early days?
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I had the opportunity to test a HTC Vive. I'd say it lives up to said expectations. The immersion was huge! The price tag is hefty. But this will change.

Imho...IF this takes off now depends on the content deliverers.
 
steppa said:
are these new technologies beginning to live up to the expectations of VRs early days?
Click to expand...

I had the opportunity to test a HTC Vive. I'd say it lives up to said expectations. The immersion was huge! The price tag is hefty. But this will change.

Imho...IF this takes off now depends on the content deliverers.
Click to expand...

Who is generating and distributing this content?


The engineers of the future will be poets. This is what virtual reality holds out to us—the possibility of walking in to the constructs of the imagination. -terence mckenna

Shamans have been dealing with spirits, entities, powers for more than 100,000 years. But it has always been on a one to one basis. One human being at a time went up Mount Sinai to talk to the fire on the mountain. But with virtual reality we have a technology to show each other our dreams and, yes, our hallucinations. -terence mckenna

According to mckenna it's the artist and poets who will design the future in this area, which is my hope.

Early virtual reality was a disappointment...but an essential step in technological evolution...the first computers would fill entire rooms and did not seem practical for the things we use them for today, those first computers were necessary, just as early VR was...

...Though in the 1990s there was real excitement for VR, which after people tried, and were disappointed by, early VR, completely faded out...

...until recently.

I'm glad to hear modern VR is fairly impressive, and can only hope it evolves and reaches many of the possible potentials.

-eg
 
The experience is amazing and I agree about the content: It's fertile soil for a new generation of artists and filmmakers.

If you have a smartphone, then buy a cardboard VR headset online and try it out.
 
According to mckenna it's the artist and poets who will design the future in this area, which is my hope.
Click to expand...

If this hope will be fullfilled depends on the ease of use of the tools which are needed to create virtual worlds.

Accessible ones yet have to be developed.
 
hixidom said:
The experience is amazing and I agree about the content: It's fertile soil for a new generation of artists and filmmakers.

If you have a smartphone, then buy a cardboard VR headset online and try it out.
Click to expand...

This is exactly what I wanted to hear!

-eg
 
steppa said:
According to mckenna it's the artist and poets who will design the future in this area, which is my hope.
Click to expand...

If this hope will be fullfilled depends on the ease of use of the tools which are needed to create virtual worlds.

Accessible ones yet have to be developed.
Click to expand...

I think the transformation of smartphones into VR devices will provide the accessibility early VR lacked, instead of needing some complicated VR machine, as you did in the early days, anybody can turn a very common device into a VR machine.

3-D and VR technology is finally advancing to a point where it would be recognizable as the first steps towards a terence mckenna-esk VR future...these seemingly impossible applications for VR proposed by folks like mckenna are finally reaching a level of plausibility never reached before, and what was once "far out" speculation may actually lay the blueprints for the possibilities in these virtual realities...

The notions espoused by mckenna in the lecture below are becoming viable technological options, and I'm sure while creating virtual realities ideas similar to mckenna will be considered...

Then there is the phenomenon of non-ordinary, or what I call visible language and this is very interesting to me. This is where technology, virtual-reality, cybernetics, human-machine interfacing can actually make an impact and explore a frontier. Visual language is a transormation of the physiological impulse towards syntax into a final product, speech, which is not heard with the ears, but beheld with the eyes. It's very interesting that all our metaphors of clarity of speech are visual metaphors. We say, "I see what you mean, he spoke clearly." This means that at the organismic level we associate a higher signal clarity with visual input, and on DMT and other tryptamine psychedelics you actually experience the field of language both heard and self generated as something that is visibly beheld. It's almost as though the project of communication becomes high-speed sculpture in a conceptual dimension made of light and intentionality. This would remain a kind of esoteric performance on the part of shamans at the height of intoxication if it were not for the fact that electronics and electronic cultural media, computers, make it possible for us to actually create records of these higher linguistic modalities. In other words it's possible to imagine a virtual reality that was driven by a speech operated synthesizer where the various parts of ordinary speech adjectives, modifiers, subjects and objects were interpreted by the cybernetic environment as topological manifolds of various shapes so that speech would then generate a visibly beheld topology and it's possible to imagine a future world where in setting up marriage contracts or in negotiating corporate takeovers, in areas where clear communication, clear expression of intentionality was very important, that people would actually go into the virtual reality to use the visible language because its capacity for conveying intent would be much greater than ordinary spoken language. It's not for nothing that Plato connected up the notion of the Good, the True, and ultimately, the Beautiful. The beautiful of those three concepts is the primary concept because it is visibly beheld, because it is seen. This is the great convincing power of the psychedelic experience. That it ultimately appeals to us through the sense that we value most. That we existentially relate to as the most authentic and that is the visual. Visible language is a kind of telepathy because if I make a statement in visual language and then you and I regard my statement, we are somehow, in the act of regarding, made one. Because meaning is not being created out of interiorized dictionaries which we each consult in the privacy of our own meaning goes public mind but rather meaning is a visible manifold in the public domain. Meaning goes public and the differences between people then decline toward being insignificant. It's a kind of final confirmation of the McLuhan apotheosis and I think visible language is coming. Life in the imagination is to be the life of creativity carried on through these virtual environments driven by linguistic engines. -terence mckenna
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entheogenic-gnosis said:
hixidom said:
The experience is amazing and I agree about the content: It's fertile soil for a new generation of artists and filmmakers.

If you have a smartphone, then buy a cardboard VR headset online and try it out.
Click to expand...

This is exactly what I wanted to hear!

-eg
Click to expand...

Hehe, but I also think, it's not what you want to SEE. On the other hand...if you have a decent smart phone with good resolution it's not that bad. Mine has 2.560 x 1.440px for example. That's more than a Rift has, which is still better overall, though. Nevertheless, resulotion really is important here.

Those cardboard thingies basically work. But they don't give you more than a glimpse of what actually is possible in this realm. Still imho it's fun using it. Content lacks a bit imho. Youtube 360° videos are pretty nice tough.

Those can be viewed on any smartphone or tablet. Worth checking out...by the way...

Example:

[YOUTUBE]
(EDIT It may be the case that this work only from within the app. In this case you'd just do a search for 360° video in that.)

With a cardboard this would not only be 360, but also 3D.

I still have one of those cardboards...they aren't the most stable ones. I'd look out for something along these lines. This was just a randon example, tough.

@The McKenna stuff

This still seems a bit far fetched to me.
 
TMK rant
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In a nutshell: language = code. Code is visible language for the consciousness. The brain/heart is basically a wlan antenna for the larger code database (aka akashic records) .

r4pal16.jpg
 
Ufostrahlen said:
TMK rant
Click to expand...
In a nutshell: language = code. Code is visible language for the consciousness. The brain/heart is basically a wlan antenna for the larger code database (aka akashic records) .

r4pal16.jpg
Click to expand...

Except in VR world the code will be controlled by the corporations, as they are the only ones with enough money to develop the hardware and software needed to produce a VR world.

Perhaps one day VR will be advanced enough that any Joe Blow will be able to create a replica of their imagined world, but hopefully it happens before the youth allget sucked into living out their lives in a giant VR infomercial.
 
I find I have an aversion to VR. Virtual Reality, even the name itself implies its some kind of inferior version of reality, something we already have for free and inherently.

To be honest part of me is interested, intrigued and excited by it. I have no doubt it could be a great tool. I like it but also dislike technology because of the way it breeds dependence.

I used to play games and could find myself deeply immersed in them, but I found that in the end that they were all ultimately unfulfilling. I fear VR could become something that one day people spend their entire lives in, and may be found to be unfulfilling much like the games I used to play. Except one may become completely dependant on VR, much like we have to other technologies. VR may be the hell/prison that we create and trap ourselves in. If you watch the majority of kids these days stuck in their (i)Pods, i(Pads), phones and tablets its not hard to see a path unfolding in that direction.

I don't like being that Luddite guy but...
 
ehud said:
In a nutshell: language = code. Code is visible language for the consciousness. The brain/heart is basically a wlan antenna for the larger code database (aka akashic records) .

Except in VR world the code will be controlled by the corporations, as they are the only ones with enough money to develop the hardware and software needed to produce a VR world.

Perhaps one day VR will be advanced enough that any Joe Blow will be able to create a replica of their imagined world, but hopefully it happens before the youth allget sucked into living out their lives in a giant VR infomercial.
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What I wanted to say: we already live in a digital simulation. Energy on, energy off, at a high frequency. 0100 100 01011 0011000... Call it the quantum world or whatever. The VR googles might make us more awake to it. And yes alot of foreign code already controls our lives. But that's not set in stone. I think we should learn more techniques to control and manipulate our own digital reality - I don't mean a CT scenario like in the movie Matrix, but more in the sense of an awakening to the true reality. Like a buddha, but without the confusing buddhist lingo.

Even though I never tried a VR headset, I thought that my last 1P-LSD trip resembled much of a virtual reality. Like someone glued on a psychedelic filter for 12h in front of my mind, because I gave the command.
 
In Terence's day computer technology was still the sole domain of acid heads and VRML was offering the promise of a completely immersive virtual internet by the turn of the millenium. If we had pursued Virtuality unimpeded from where we were in 1990, we might just be living in the techno-eschaton Terence promised us.

When my six year old self first climbed into the ring, donned the headset, and entered the Dactyl Nightmare all those years ago in that grungy little downtown Gibsonesque hole in the wall arcade aptly named "Cyberspace", that was as impactful, important, and mind bending of an experience as my first immersion into hyperspace a decade and a half later.

Deep down I do still believe in the promise of VR technology to radically transform the paradigm and function as the genesis point for singularity...
ehud said:
Except in VR world the code will be controlled by the corporations
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Except for that.

When I first saw that crowd funding page for the Rift I was ecstatic, finally someone picked up the plot and we were back on track. When it actually got funded and the dev kits came out, we had the working prototype and the possibilities for building on it were unlimited. When that infinite promise got sold off to Facebook for an ungodly sum, I watched all that potential crushed under the boot of preponderancy once again. And now here we are, VR is solidly in the hands of the perpetuators of the status quo and the potential revolution is to be forever lost in a sea of mindless divertissement.
 
ehud said:
Except in VR world the code will be controlled by the corporations, as they are the only ones with enough money to develop the hardware and software needed to produce a VR world.
Click to expand...

That is only partitionally true. And certainly not for the software aspect. There are already tools which everybody can use. Unreal 4 engine, Unity engine etc.

They are free to use. Everybody can go get one and beginn building virtual worlds. Thing here is, that most people just don't have the skills for that. Here come the accessibility bit into play. We need more intuitive tools for artists which aren't already working in the CGI field and thus not used to it's tools.

But we are on the way...

[YOUTUBE]
 
It's interesting, but I'm not sure... Real reality is already just about too much for me. I think this technology is SUPER dangerous for a society full of people that can't idle for five minutes without plugging their faces into a screen. I do think it will have great applications for art/design/architecture/etc. But I think the "entertainment" stuff will overshadow all that.
 
steppa said:
ehud said:
Except in VR world the code will be controlled by the corporations, as they are the only ones with enough money to develop the hardware and software needed to produce a VR world.
Click to expand...

That is only partitionally true. And certainly not for the software aspect. There are already tools which everybody can use. Unreal 4 engine, Unity engine etc.
Click to expand...
I agree with you. The "corporate" Rift is already less attractive than the more "communist" HTC/Vive. The hardware is better and isn't Valve giving M$ the final push with fully supporting Linux? I mean the Unreal engine & Unity engine are fully supported under Linux, right? All 3D cards have full Linux support. What else do we want? ICs and hires displays don't grow on trees, that's why we have corporations. Because one single chip factory costs ~ $5Bn per piece - it's not like you can manufacture ICs and displays in your hippie commune. So there's nothing to argue on the software side imo. If commercial software will dominate the market, it's solely the fault of the consumer.

I think this technology is SUPER dangerous for a society full of people that can't idle for five minutes without plugging their faces into a screen.
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Quite the contrary, it will be an awakening imo. You can already numb your mind 24h, you don't need VR for that. But the new applications will transform society for the better.
 
Ufostrahlen said:
If commercial software will dominate the market, it's solely the fault of the consumer.
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Is it still their fault when they are born into this VR infomercial?

Ufostrahlen said:
Quite the contrary, it will be an awakening imo. You can already numb your mind 24h, you don't need VR for that. But the new applications will transform society for the better.
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Yes because all the last "new applications" have done just that haven't they?

I would say the trend seems pretty clear. The more we build these technologies that extend our capabilities, the more reliant and underdeveloped we become in those areas. Just imagine how virtual spirituality will effect our spiritual development as a society.

I guess thats not a problem for those who don't believe in spirituality or its necessity in a balanced and progressive society.
 
Hmmmm... I don't buy the virtual reality fad. Why? We already have a world in front of our eyes... and we have psychedelics. A high-dose psilocybin journey, though I haven't yet ventured that far, would be FAR more interesting than virtual reality.

The contents of a future virtual reality environment? I don't see it being too much different than today's television culture - full of advertizements, mind junk-food, and anything the corporate content provider wants us to think, feel and believe. It's going to turn into another form of mind control and distraction from the real world our physical forms inhabit - enhanced, at that.

Even if virtual reality does turn out to be feasible enough, without any negative physical effects like nausea, and isn't controlled by the greedy, insane corporate monsters or guided by the psychotic, sociopathic globalist think-tanks, it still wouldn't hold anywhere near a much interest for me as psychedelics and a real, powerful journey through mind, time and hyperspace.

Virtual reality and brain chips to go alongside them still wouldn't hold a candle to beautiful, powerful bonfire of deep psychedelic effects and experiences, most of which are experienced according to individual consciousness. Virtual reality, though, might just become a sort of herion on the horrifying level of television, as Terence McKenna described it. It won't give the same experience as psychedelics will, though, I feel.

Make of this post what you will. :)
 
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