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And what will that do to our minds and to us as social animals?
The development of “virtual reality” is in the news these days with Facebook rebranding itself as “Meta” and its founder emphasizing his intention to develop a “metaverse” of virtual reality. Microsoft reportedly has similar intentions for virtual reality. So further developments in that direction seem inevitable.
Virtual reality has been creeping up on us for a long time, starting with imaginative storytelling, followed by written works of fiction, movies, radio and television, and accelerating with the development of the internet, immersive video games, and simulated worlds like Second Life and other life-simulation games.
And warnings and critiques about virtual realities also have a long history, including E. M. Forster’s prescient story, “The Machine Stops” ( https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/Machine_stops.pdf ).
In this essay I want to explore how language might and might not work in a truly immersive virtual reality, and what that may teach us about such endeavors and about ourselves.
I will start by assuming that virtual realities will be designed initially for adults, who may speak and write in different languages. A fairly obvious way to cope with…
