On a recent Thursday evening at the City Life Community Center
in Missoula, Montana, Wolf Heffelfinger played laser tag.
Wearing a pair of heavy goggles, he bobbed across the gymnasium,
firing faux laser guns with both hands. It was not all that different from any
other game of laser tag — except he was playing in virtual reality.
اضافة اعلان
As he and a friend raced around the gym, he saw himself
sprinting down the neon-lit corridors of a spacecraft. So did his friend. With
virtual reality goggles strapped over their eyes, they could not see each
other. But they could chase each other in an imaginary world.
For Heffelfinger, a 48-year-old musician, entrepreneur and free
spirit, the game was another step in a decadelong obsession with virtual
reality. Since the arrival of the seminal Oculus headset in 2013, he has played
games in virtual reality, watched movies, visited distant lands and assumed new
identities.
He sees his virtual adventures as a relentless search for the
dopamine rush that comes when the technology takes him somewhere new. When he
reaches the edge of what the technology can do, the rush wanes. He has put his
many headsets on the shelf, where they have sat for months. But when advances
arrive, he leaps back in.
Heffelfinger’s on-and-off preoccupation synchronizes with the
tech industry’s on-and-off affair with virtual reality, investing billions in a
concept that has for several years appeared just a few steps from going
mainstream without quite getting there.
Now virtual reality technology may be another step closer to a
mass market, with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and other well-known executives
heralding the arrival of “the metaverse” — a digital world where people can
communicate via virtual reality and other new and yet-to-be-invented
technologies — and repeated rumors that Apple will jump into the mix.
There is a question, however, if virtual reality is truly ready
for mainstream consumers. Over the years, improvements have never quite matched
expectations. It is as if science fiction — decades of novels, movies and
television about virtual reality — has set people up for perpetual
disappointment.
“I want it to be part of my life, and I always think it will
be,” Heffelfinger said. “But the dream always ends.”
As Heffelfinger prepared for his game of laser tag in the
Missoula community center, a group of teenagers were playing paintball one
floor below. It was largely the same game: goggles, faux guns and pursuit
around a gym. But the teenagers remained in the real world.
When asked why he did not just sign up for a game of
old-fashioned paintball, Heffelfinger said playing in a world of science
fiction made all the difference. He enjoyed being taken away. “I can enter the
movie,” he said.
He could even be a different person. As he and his friend, John
Brownell, booted up the game, called Space Pirate Arena, Heffelfinger chose a
big, beefy, ostentatiously masculine avatar dressed in camouflage. Brownell
chose one that looked a lot like actress Angelina Jolie. Heffelfinger imagined
himself in a dystopian world.
“An episode of ‘Black Mirror’ flashed through my mind, where
these two guys fall in love with each other in VR by choosing different
avatars,” he said, referring to a science fiction series on Netflix. “I don’t
think he realized the effect this had on me.”
Heffelfinger visited Egyptian pyramids. He watched Stanley
Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” in virtual reality while suspended in a float
tank. He took a local police detective through a virtual re-creation of
Missoula, stitched together from high-definition photos, and they came to see
the technology as a way of investigating a crime scene without being there.
Sometimes, on cloudy Montana days, he would disappear into virtual reality just
to see the sun.
“The nature of these fantasy worlds is that they feed dopamine
into the reward pathways of our brains,” said Anna Lembke, a Stanford
University psychiatrist and the author of “Dopamine Nation,” an exploration of
addiction in the modern world. “They carry the potential for addiction.”
But as with other addictions, tolerances are developed. Reaching
the dopamine high gets harder.
Heffelfinger grew tired of each new headset. The experiences
were repetitive. He could not move as freely as he would like. He could not
really connect with other people. Virtual reality could not quite match the
vitality of the real world, and sometimes it made him sick.
He turned one headset into a plant holder and another into a
piece of neckwear he wore on walks through the Montana mountains. “It turns out
that a walk outside is much more fun,” he said.
But he always bought another pair of goggles. Sometimes, he
spent hundreds of dollars on headsets for friends, hoping they would join him
in virtual reality. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, he saw the technology as
an ideal antidote to quarantine, and for a time, it was. He could mingle with
friends and strangers in an ethereal gathering place called AltspaceVR.
He will probably get bored again. Like many people who use the
technology, he believes many more years will pass before it becomes an
unshakable part of everyday life. And he admits that no matter how good the
technology gets, he is wary of spending too much time there.
“I like going into virtual reality,” he said. “But I always want
to come out.”
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