Everyone's been busy dunking on Mark Zuckerberg's "metaverse" announcement over the last few days, the big virtual reality app that's going to finally get all of us wearing goggles and gesturing with weird gloves or whatever. The scorn is justified. We've had 30 years of buildup for functioning VR, and what we got was blobby floating torsos in that most exciting of environments – an office conference room!Virtual whiteboards! Be still my heart!As Wired Magazine pointed out so effectively a few weeks before the big Facebook announcement, we've had commercial VR, in some form or another, for years, and it just keeps failing to find a broadly popular application. Heck, we've had VR in arcades, in limited capacities, going back to the early 1990s! If it was going to be a thing, it would be a thing by now!One of the frequent claims for science fiction is that it inspires new technologies, and never has that been more true than for classic-style goggles and gloves VR, a technology that shows up in major 1990s works from the heavy hitters of cyberpunk – in Pat Cadigan's Tea From an Empty Cup, in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, in the toolkit of the storm chasers in Bruce Sterling's Heavy Weather, and of course, in William Gibson's Virtual Light. Virtual reality isn't a technology of the present. In some ways, it will always be a technology of the decade in which it was popularized, the 1990s. And that's fitting, because Virtual Light is the most '90s book ever written.
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Deep Strata: Virtual Light, VR dreams, and…
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Everyone's been busy dunking on Mark Zuckerberg's "metaverse" announcement over the last few days, the big virtual reality app that's going to finally get all of us wearing goggles and gesturing with weird gloves or whatever. The scorn is justified. We've had 30 years of buildup for functioning VR, and what we got was blobby floating torsos in that most exciting of environments – an office conference room!Virtual whiteboards! Be still my heart!As Wired Magazine pointed out so effectively a few weeks before the big Facebook announcement, we've had commercial VR, in some form or another, for years, and it just keeps failing to find a broadly popular application. Heck, we've had VR in arcades, in limited capacities, going back to the early 1990s! If it was going to be a thing, it would be a thing by now!One of the frequent claims for science fiction is that it inspires new technologies, and never has that been more true than for classic-style goggles and gloves VR, a technology that shows up in major 1990s works from the heavy hitters of cyberpunk – in Pat Cadigan's Tea From an Empty Cup, in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, in the toolkit of the storm chasers in Bruce Sterling's Heavy Weather, and of course, in William Gibson's Virtual Light. Virtual reality isn't a technology of the present. In some ways, it will always be a technology of the decade in which it was popularized, the 1990s. And that's fitting, because Virtual Light is the most '90s book ever written.