YoI’m writing this from a room slowly orbiting the Earth. Behind the floating screen in front of me, through a giant opening where a wall should be, the planet rotates slowly, 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 lit lights to my left. The soft hum of the air circulation system hums quietly behind me.
I spent a week doing everything I could (working, exercising, composing) in my virtual reality headset. This was the year that VR threatened to go mainstream, with prices becoming more affordable and Apple entering the market, so I wanted to see how far VR has come since I first tried it in the middle of the decade. 2010, when the main experiences on offer. They were nausea-inducing roller coaster simulators. I used a recent model from Meta, called Quest 3, and the conclusion was clear: this now works. It seems a little unfinished, but we’ve reached the point where virtual reality can finally become really useful.
The biggest surprise was working in virtual reality. I can’t recommend this enough. By putting on a headset, you can summon multiple screens all connected to your computer, make them as big as you want, and place them anywhere in your environment. “Passthrough” (the ability to see digital objects superimposed on the real world, made possible by cameras built into the front of the headset) means you can create a window from the virtual environment to see your keyboard. And you can choose from any number of environments to work in, from minimalist cafes to mountain lodges, switching between them at will. I quickly got to a stage where, if I’m working alone, I’d rather work in VR than in reality.
The main problem is the general lack of polish. The headphones don’t look like a finished product. Maybe it’s 10% too heavy, like a lab prototype that hasn’t been perfected yet. The battery won’t get you through a whole day. From time to time, drivers disconnect without explanation. I took it on a plane to work, but the challenge of connecting it to my laptop using the in-flight Wi-Fi proved insurmountable.
But watching a movie in virtual reality during the flight was nothing short of extraordinary. Yes, I felt a very British need to apologize to my neighbor – wearing headphones in public has not yet achieved socially acceptable status. However, as soon as I pressed play, I knew it would be difficult to get back to the in-flight entertainment. I was sitting in a movie theater, with dim lights and a few rows of staggered seats separating me from a huge screen on a virtual wall. In long periods without turbulence, I actually forgot we were flying. If there was a downside, it’s that I was so immersed that I almost missed the breakfast cart that was passing by.
The cinema, of course, was empty apart from me – by design. Other applications are not so sparsely populated intentionally. I downloaded one that promised live virtual concerts. Upon entering the virtual lobby, I discovered that there were no concerts or signs that they were planned. No matter: it also offered a space where you could socialize when there were no events. I loaded it. It was a beautifully designed virtual world, all domes, arches and curved ramps. But it was a ghost town. I was the only one there. And this is an app that the Internet considers one of the most popular for live music.
When people think of virtual reality, they often imagine Ready Player One, the science fiction novel and film about a world in which people spend most of their time in a shared virtual reality: congregating there as avatars, mingling, talking, watching sports or music. together. This seems very far away. There are games that hint at this collective experience, such as Gorilla Tag, where children gather after school and play tag like a gorilla, chatting with each other and moving their arms to move. But VR adoption is not yet widespread enough for Ready Player One’s vision to become a reality. Nowadays, the key to getting the most out of VR (if you’re not a gamer) is to use it for activities you do on your own.
Work, at least for a certain type of knowledge worker, is one of those activities, and someone deeply embedded in the industry recently told me that he sees it as the fastest-growing use case. It’s easier to be productive in virtual reality. The clutter in your office will disappear and be replaced by whatever relaxing environment you feel like that day. Monitors that in the real world would cost thousands of dollars appear before you when you ask for them. As a place to sit at my keyboard and write music, a virtual forest in the mountains is infinitely preferable to the gray walls of my studio. All distractions disappear from view.
Another is exercise. I had a personal training session in my garden, with a virtual trainer floating in the air in front of me. Stepping, which was recently added to the Quest, is key here as it means you can use weights, which isn’t a sensible idea on previous models that completely obscured the real world. It seems reasonable to expect that on-demand personal training at home will allow me to exercise regularly, where so many fleeting gym memberships have failed.
The launch of Apple’s Vision Pro headset earlier this year was meant to be the kickoff for virtual reality. It wasn’t. It’s an engineering marvel, magical to use, but it still doesn’t have enough compelling applications and the Price from £3,500 rules it out for most people. Stories of headsets collecting dust or being returned have led some to think that virtual reality is little more than another advertising bubble for a tech industry desperate to find the next big thing.
But virtual reality is not an exaggeration. There are problems to solve, of course. But I think we have reached a turning point. If you adopt it as something single-player (and something you won’t use much in public), it’s really useful. Work, entertainment, exercise: everything is already fantastic in virtual reality. Don’t count on small, rectangular screens as the way humanity will communicate with machines forever.
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Ed Newton-Rex is the founder of Fairly Trained, a nonprofit that certifies generative AI companies that respect creators’ rights, and a visiting scholar at Stanford University.