In general, in my opinion, virtual reality is a good concept, but the adoption of it to me is still in its infancy, and it does seem like it is hastily rushed and overly hyped. However, as a technology enthusiast who has worked in the computer gaming industry for over three years, I understand why John Carmack felt this passionate about the future of VR because he is one of the best video gaming developers of our time. Without him, I would not even be able to picture where the gaming industry would have progressed. So, to understand his passion and put our topic into a more elaborated context, let us temporarily set the topic of VR aside and tell you a little about his background, expertise, and contribution to the gaming industry. I guarantee you that it will all be worthwhile and relate back to our topic of VR.

Now, to speak about his contribution, we would have to go back to the early 1990s when he was still around our age, the early 20s. Back then, the concept of video gaming or gaming on demand was still in its infancy, just like VR. But luckily for him, he foresaw the rise of video gaming as an unchartered territory that is worthy of exploration. So, with that passion, together with his long-term buddy that he met at his previous company John Romero, they established a new company called id Software. There, his team designed and created the very first game engine that is widely celebrated and used worldwide and is, in fact, still in use today. With this engine, id Software designed the very first game with enhanced graphics based on 3D modeling, DOOM. And since DOOM came with unprecedented and breathtaking three-dimensional graphics, it required significant graphics processing power. 

This, quite frankly, gave rise to the first very 3D graphics accelerators, which later became what is known as the graphics card. The first graphics accelerator was based on 3dFX’s voodoo family, a company now defunct and acquired by Nvidia. After DOOM, his team at id Software developed their second game called Quake, in which the graphics received another significant boost with the lighting and shadow effects based on the rasterization rendering methods that we are seeing used in mostly all of our modern-day games. So with that, one could simply imagine how much graphics processing power the graphics accelerators will require to run this game. This incredible improvement in graphics drastically led to our technological advances, especially with graphics processing.

Now, I am confident that you can see why he is such an instrumental person and why he is so enthusiastic about the future of VR. That is because he has singled handily created the industry of graphics accelerators or graphics cards with his games that demand more processing power. Similarly, if he was able to revolutionize the entire gaming industry, what would it take to stop him from revolutionizing the entire virtual reality ecosystem? You are right; no one. After Nvidia unveiled the ray tracing technology back in 2018. Of how the graphics cards can now calculate, in a real-time fashion as the game scenes render, how light rays bounce from and off an object, I am confident to say that the future of games will be even more realistic from here on and out. Who knows, game scenes just might become so natural soon that we might be unable to tell what is reality and what is fictional, just like the analogy portrayed in the Allegory of the Cave poetry written by Plato or the movie The Matrix.

Nevertheless, putting all the hype aside, and if we circle back to the topic of VR, although this technology is fascinating, it still requires a massive amount of tinkering. With that, several challenges must first be addressed. So, first things first, let us start with the basics, the practicality of the headsets themselves. In my personal experience, the headset is exceptionally agonizing to use, especially for a person who wears glasses. Every time I wear the headset, I feel I have to do so much extra work just to ensure the glasses do not fog up or are otherwise crushed by the VR headset. In order for me to use the headset, I would have to first take my glasses off and put the glasses inside of the headset before putting the headset on. With that, when I was using the headset, all I felt was discomfort and frustration with the device, which significantly reduced my overall enjoyability. And all of these frustrations inevitably equate to John Carmack’s idea of having “more movement.” I do not believe that when he said more friction and movement, he only referred to physical bodily actions. There has to be part of the psychological factor, that is, the enjoyment of the product;  quite frankly, the movement of neurons inside of our brain. If this is not resolved, it will hinder these headsets’ ability for mass adaptation.

Now, if we shift away from practicality and move toward the various applications I have used, it is even more depressing, to say the least. On top of the required applications that I have received from school, I have also purchased several adventurous applications on my own dime, such as National Geographics. At first, I was expecting to be able to visit various places around the world to see the recorded scenery and learn about these places through a virtual tour guide. However, I could only see computerized graphics of icebergs and glaciers without anyone explaining to me in immense detail what exactly I was seeing or what those were. As for the traveling mechanisms in this application, it is also very hectic and inconvenient as it would sometimes lose grip on the paddling boards. I would expect an application like this to be more interactive, but sadly, it is far from what I had anticipated and expected.

As for the school applications, although the applications and games are fun, they are still very much for entertainment, not so much pertaining to course materials. Also, as a result of the immense discomfort of the VR headsets, I have not been on these game applications as much as others, such as Bigscreen VR and those natural experiment applications. Speaking about Bigscreen VR, I understand that this application is still in its early public beta development stages, so it was not meant to be perfect. However, when I was using it, I noticed that I could not raise the screen to the ceiling to watch the movies while lying in bed, so I had to sit upright to enjoy the film I had purchased directly inside the application, which boasted 3D, but in reality, it had no 3D effects. Also, while watching the movie, the headset went out of battery, and I knew that I had fully charged the headset before starting the film. This means that the battery pack in this headset cannot even last through the duration of a two-and-a-half-hour movie. The battery life was horrifically short, which also, again, reduced the overall enjoyability. Adding on top of the immense discomfort of wearing the headset with prescription glasses further fuels that inner frustration.

Overall, I believe that the trajectory of developments of VR is very misplaced and utterly underwhelming, to say the least. My first taste of VR headsets was with Samsung’s Gear VR, released in 2014, some eight years ago. After seeing how the current VR applications are in action, I genuinely believe that VR technology has garnered little to no improvements over the past eight years. The only little progress it achieved was that it no longer requires a smartphone to display content and has become detached and untethered from a computer. Referencing back to how incredible it was for John Carmack to ultimately shape and revolutionize the video game industry, that is precisely the type of revamp that VR needs. If we look back at the late 1990s, we can clearly see that the games drove the innovation of devices, not vice-versa. Here is a perfect analogy to this very issue. Microsoft Office was first released in the early 1990s, and Google Docs was released in 2006. Now, the google suite family of apps, including Google Docs, has been growing increasingly popular with its user base, especially in recent years, even more so than Microsoft Office. But would Google be so successful if it was not for backward compatibility and adaptability to Microsoft Office’s already existing filename extension? The answer is clearly no. Here’s another great analogy. During the early days of Nvidia’s founding, Nvidia refused to adapt to the industry standard of inverse-texture mapping technology. So they have gone ahead and developed their NV2 chips based on their quadratic texture mapping methods, which means that they are not backward compatible with many of the graphics APIs or application programming interface that utilizes inverse-texture mapping technology. This created huge problems when SEGA tried to port the game over to their Dreamcast gaming consoles. When SEGA finally spoke with Nvidia about this, Nvidia stubbornly rejected their proposal, which later led to the souring end of their partnership.

So, the question now is, why do I mention this historical feud between Nvidia and SEGA? That is because we need more players in this ecosystem for this uncharted exploration to be successful. Not only can Meta not be the only player in this ecosystem, but all applications must be universally usable across all devices. Furthermore, these applications or games, quite frankly, need to have a purpose already outside of VR. This will ensure that VR players can interact with people playing the application or game outside the VR. Only then would we be able to achieve what Chalmer referred to as reality and virtual reality in his book Reality Plus, a one-for-all and all-for-one.