Walker wrote: ↑Tue Jul 08, 2025 3:03 pm
Does immersion in VR induce disassociation from reality, or enhanced immersion in reality, when away from the hardware?
Certainly a degree of disassociation occurs from the reality of my study and my house. I first started doing VR back in 2016, early days where the tech was pretty much an enthusiast situation - expensive hardware with not much software to experience a full potential of what the tech is capable of.
It always used to make me rather sad when I removed my headset after being in my 'home room' - basically, a virtual home where you can load into games. The reason being, my home room that I set was up in mountains with a massive balcony - truly would be a multi-million dollar house, were it
real. I'd remove my headset and return to my rather average house in a rather average suburb.
The 'enhanced immersion of reality' - not sure about that. Although you are limited to two of the main human senses, being vision and sound - you obviously are not getting the
feeling of things, no motion when playing car racing games nor smells and tactile thangs. There is force feedback in my racing steering wheel, which vibrates too when going over rough terrain, that's pretty good but obviously short of the real thing. Hand controllers have haptic feedback when doing certain things with the hands - and I've recently seen a virtual gun piece of hardware that causes an actual recoil. Understand that within the headphones and the visuals when shooting a gun, it sounds like a gun, it looks like your gun in your hand is recoiling from shooting the projectile, so with hardware like that actually causing your hand to kick back, pretty bloody cool - i'd consider purchasing that.
So re 'enhanced immersion of reality' - no, the sense of reality to ones consciousness is obviously reduced, however - when playing a game on a 2D screen compared to standing up and actually being IN the game, huge difference - thus in that respect, yes it is an enhanced immersion of reality of a virtual world - a game - to be in it, rather than spectating it on a screen.
Have you ever experienced a high quality VR headset? ..understand, everything is tracked with what I am talking about to within a millimetre precision, that is your hands and your head are tracked within a 3D space that you have outlined as your room space - thus you can walk around within the virtual space and everything is relayed within the headset accurately.
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