Virtual Reality - Help or Harm?
Virtual Reality – Help or Harm?
Introduction:
Gone are the days when debate revolved around the reel and real life of people. The new thing is reality v/s virtual or a combination of both called ‘Virtual Reality.’ The tech junkies are swooning all over the new devices of virtual reality or VR to experience whatever they want without having to go anywhere or do anything at all.
While the smaller headsets of VR are already available, India might soon be open to experience Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. These will take gaming to a new level, an experience beyond imagination. Be the hero of your own games and feel the exhilaration of entering the virtual gaming world while cozying in your living room. Sit in your virtual land of snowfall or sunshine and enjoy a virtual meal there.
While virtual reality might seem a delight of a kind, we have a whole lot of wiser men worrying about the harmful effects this next generation of tech device might bring along. We have parents worrying for the right reason. They have yet to get hold of their kids addicted to Smartphones and here is something so much better to allure them.
Help:
1. Connecting people: Chatting and video calling over social network is going to be a thing of the past with virtual reality taking you instantly to meet the people you want to speak to in person. You don’t need to travel all the miles to be with your family. Distance would no longer matter when you can be with the people you want to stay connected to while staying afar for making a career.
2. Training without risking: Army personnel would no longer have to risk their lives to experience combats in different kind of environment and situations. Training them would be so much better, easier and fun with no real danger. Other professionals would also benefit training with virtual reality especially doctors, architectures, engineers, and aviation and naval officers.
3. Tourism without travelling: You might want to see the world, its various wonder cities and numerous monuments far away from your reach and expenses. With virtual reality, Paris would come to you to witness the special moment of your life and Vegas would no longer be an unfulfilled dream for you. A real life experience of seeing through the streets and corners of your favorite destination will only be a headset away with these amazing devices.
4. Gaming like never before: For all the gamers of the world, virtual reality will be the best thing ever. Fight Zombies and vampires – make the unreal that you believe in appear real before you. Let the force be strong with you and be the Commander in Star Wars – a dream come true experience of every game lover. Everything that you thought was just confined to your Xboxes could now come out and join you in the rendezvous of celebrating virtual reality.
5. A therapy for the unfortunate: Imagine the kind of happiness that a handicapped or disabled person could experience with virtual reality giving them the feeling of being capable of doing anything and everything they ever wanted to. Hope, for them, is the best medicine. Stress could be fought with happiness, no matter virtual or real. If it can bring you joy then it should be a keeper. Doctors and therapists could use virtual reality to help patients come out of their distressed state of mind.
Harm:
1. Burn pockets or burn with envy: The whooping large sum of money that could bring you this virtual box of happiness and help can either burn a hole in your pocket or will leave you burning with desire and envy when your friends get one. The high pricing is going to be a problem in the Indian market where majority of people won’t be able to afford these fancy tech gadgets. There will be a feeling of being left out when everyone around the world would be talking virtual reality.
2. Addiction: Whoever thinks that gaming addicts are only something we see and hear about in news, hasn’t met one clearly. They are obsessed with their gadgets and forget the world outside, ignore their responsibilities, eat junk and become obese and gradually lose everything they had including job. Now imagine what virtual reality could do to people. They could get so used to living in the virtual world of dreams that bring them happiness that they would completely shut themselves out of the real world. It would be alluring enough to make them think outside the virtual world.
3. Deception: The virtual world, however gratifying it may appear, will be a deception of reality. Seeing and believing things that are not real could be harmful in many a ways. People you connect to over the internet are not always real but when they could utilize the tools of virtual reality to fool you for what you see, deciding between truth and trickery would be more difficult than ever. People might easily fall for traps set by anti-social miscreants who are always on the lookout for innocents ready to be brainwashed. Cons will see a brand new setup with virtual reality.
4. Health issues: People have reported motion sickness with prolonged usage of virtual reality. Doctors also fear that people could develop worthlessness and low self-esteem when they confine themselves to the virtual world.
5. Simulation is not the same as real setup: Training people in the virtually simulated environment where they are aware of no risk and apprehensions would be less benefitting than real life training that is essential before facing the professional world. At the same time another concern would be to determine if someone doing well in a virtual training would show the same aptitude in a real situation of the same level.
Conclusion:
Virtual Reality is the next big thing, no doubt, but we need to remember that with every new hobbyhorse comes new threats and challenges. Keeping your personal life in privacy was never a concern before social media came up. Similar anticipations are natural for this new sensational device that promises an out of the world experience.
A developing technology that it still is, will bring in new excitements and we must keep in check that we limit our usage of the new tech gadget to a minimum. We could benefit largely from virtual reality if only we could keep checking and assessing our reality from time to time.
We would also need to be extra careful to avoid falling for traps that could invade our privacy and get hold of our confidential information. Hackers will find new ways to threaten our secrecy and we will need to be wise and smart enough to not let them have the privilege of disturbing our lives.
