It will come up often in discussion, in comments underneath an article, on a forum in a thread related to virtual reality – some smartass wanting to be clever points out that most of what we have today ‘is not really VR’. What he means is that recorded video, which constitutes the bulk of present vr porn, is not really virtual reality. In fact, for such purists, only digital 3D worlds we can move around in constitute authentic virtual reality as it was originally conceived in the 1950’s.
Of course, such worlds may well be the ultimate goal, but it’s nonsense to say that even today’s relatively crude forms of stereoscopic recorded 180 videos are not ‘virtual reality’. Virtual reality in common parlance, and to anybody who understands simple English, means a substitute world that effectively replaces the real one. Today’s virtual experiences are a crude form of what will be available, hopefully, even in 10 years time. But put on your headset and press play, and you are still being transported into another pair of eyes and ears, with the intention being of experiencing a different version of reality.
Here’s a fairly definitive answer I read this morning on a forum from a fellow pornographer ‘VRDommy‘-
While I’m sure nobody wants to have that VR/360 argument…
Virtual Reality is any perceived reality that is not your true reality. Made-up or not.
Where everyone went wrong with that definition a few years ago,
is that they defined VR by one of the first representations in a piece of hardware,
and if it was different than that, it was not VR but something else.And it could be that enough force has been applied to it to change it forever.
But those initial Goggles should have been given a name of their own.
Instead of casting names to the hardware, they redefined the meaning of the tech to separate them.
The 3D is just the needed immersion via depth perception to make it ‘real/natural’.
JMHO but I have been around it long enough to know it well before the Rift DK1.
Somehow since then, everything has been changing to suit one interest or another.
And I have gotten very weary of it.
Wikipedia has an interesting and extensive history of the concept and technology of virtual reality :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality
