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Although equipment that can produce deeply immersive experiences of interactions with virtual partners is likely to be confined to specialized facilities for the foreseeable future, improvements in computer graphics power and speed are rapidly bringing decent-quality immersive virtual reality experiences to within the reach of consumer budgets. A baseline system for generating helmet-based digital worlds with some motion tracking can be had for about $20,000, around the same price as a high-end home theater. The much more affordable Nintendo Wii, with its wireless controller, is perhaps the thin edge of the wedge for consumer-grade virtual reality environments meant to be installed in homes. This controller gives users the ability to immerse themselves physically in a script by holding a wand whose movements through three-dimensional space are incorporated into such things as virtual tennis, golf, and combat. Like Second Life and similar ventures, we adapt so well to developments such as these because of our extremely flexible context- and view-based understanding of physical space. Our minds leap joyfully from one kind of space to another with scarcely a backward glance because they are built to absorb the shocks of a world put together one brief, disconnected glimpse at a time.

The advent of such technologies in our homes presents both great opportunities and great risks. If a game like StarCraft can cause players to forget to feed themselves or to go for days without sleep, then what happens when we can invite Attila the Hun into our living room to engage in swordplay with a weapon whose heft we feel in our hands? At the very least, we will need to come to a fuller understanding of the elements of game play that contribute to addiction. But we will also have to take seriously the issue of
how to ensure that the lines between physical and virtual reality are drawn cleanly enough to prevent social havoc.

Understanding more about how human beings, especially young ones, engage with immersive virtual worlds could help us to arrive at a rational rating system for regulating the sales of such software and educating users about the potential risks. As virtual environments become more common and compelling, we will need to address questions about the extent to which we should expect normal social mores and legal frameworks to apply in the virtual realm.

Such questions are already being raised in Linden Lab’s Second Life. When the world was initially set up, residents who refused to adhere to a code of conduct that included provisions designed to prevent harassment of other members were incarcerated in “the corn field,” a dark corner of a simulated farmer’s field in which nothing happened. Avatars were sentenced to various lengths of forced stays in the field. More recently, a lawyer has sued Linden Labs for violating trade practices in a land deal where the land in question consisted of simulated real estate in Second Life. Though this might be seen as a publicity stunt, such issues will arise more frequently as we begin to use virtual realms as legitimate extensions of our lived spaces and invest time, emotion, and, perhaps most important, money in our virtual lives. Imagine how these kinds of issues could multiply in virtual realms in which we can see, hear, and feel one another with much higher degrees of fidelity than are currently possible.

In spite of the challenges and risks, wider availability of good-quality immersive virtual experiences in homes holds great promise. Educators will have tremendous opportunities to take advantage of an inherent appetite for game play in children, providing them with knowledge and experience that would be hard to acquire in any other way. Imagine a game like the hugely popular geography quest
“Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” rendered in full immersion and in three dimensions. In institutions such as universities and perhaps larger community centers, more powerful immersive virtual reality setups could generate precisely detailed walkthroughs of ancient Rome or Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in which students could learn by talking to local “residents,” participating in group activities, and manipulating virtual objects with the look and feel of the real thing. Applications of such technologies are limited only by the imagination of the content developer.

Though we have, perhaps, never been so close to realizing the technology to make it so, the idea that we can embed our minds into sweeping simulations of space to produce compelling illusions of reality is far from new. The earliest versions of such simulated realities, such as Morton Heilig’s Sensorama, were based on unwieldy mechanical contraptions that did a credible job of lifting the focus of a person’s embodiment from their physical place to a virtual one.
¹⁴
In the 1980s, when virtual reality helmets and computer technology began to reach the minimal technical standard to have some industrial uses, there was tremendous media interest in the possibility that virtual reality would enter the mainstream as a means of entertainment and communication. Though simulation methods are now commonly used in industry and in the military, the predicted mass consumer rush to this new technology never took place. Many of the reasons for this have been technological—there is still a large gap between what can be shown on tiny screens in front of the eyes and what the real world has to offer. Virtual reality also suffered seriously from overhype. The experience in a virtual reality arcade game at an amusement park fell so far short of expectations generated by the first flush of
media reports about this emerging technology that the public lost interest quickly.

In addition to the practical limitations posed by the problem of presenting consumers with decent-quality immersive experiences in virtual worlds, certain psychological factors were at play, and continue to lurk in the popular consciousness. William Gibson’s novel
Neuromancer
, Neal Stephenson’s
Snow Crash
, and the popular series of
Matrix
movies by the Wachowski brothers all present bleak visions of a future in which technology allows us to build virtual spaces that are indistinguishable from physical ones. In each of these cases, and in many others, we are given glimpses of dystopic worlds in which parallel virtual universes are used like weapons to produce mass delusions that crush the human spirit, or in which the virtual worlds we create become forums for the exercise of our basest impulses, untrammeled by the normal mores of social conduct and even freed from the operation of physical law. Optimistic visions of how virtual realities might enhance our lives are remarkably rare. In fact, even in Second Life, a low-immersion virtual space that is being marketed aggressively by mainstream media as the harbinger of a new way of using virtual embodiment to communicate, have fun, and do business, a seamy side appears to be emerging. Children must be sequestered on their own servers with stringent controls lest they be stalked. In a simulation of a Darfur refugee camp designed to raise consciousness of a real-world horror, self-styled superhero vigilantes have had to organize themselves to protect the camp from raids by apparent by racist groups intent on vandalism and hateful graffiti.
¹⁵

Though his pungent criticism of the effects of rapid information transmission transcends virtual reality and includes any form of communication that collapses space, French philosopher Paul Virilio warns us forebodingly of the impact on human relations
and power politics when all space collapses to a single point and when everything happens simultaneously.
¹⁶
One of the greatest consequences of such technologies, already well under way, is that the power of one group over another will come to be dominated by what we can see rather than by where we are.

The hegemony of glimpses can be seen in the way wars are now conducted. Whenever possible, battles are conducted from the air. Occupying a territory can often mean being able to see it from overhead, by satellite or by high-altitude drone that can aim cruise missiles, or via gigantic surveillance planes such as the AWACS. Though bombs may still drop from planes, often the
threat
of bombs will be enough to control territory. Because our eyes can be placed anywhere in an instant, all walls have dropped and we can both possess and be possessed by sight alone.

This might not seem like an entirely negative point of view. A vision of warfare with soldiers writhing together in mud and blood could be replaced by one composed of nothing more than dueling electronic eyes, but it must be remembered that those few who control the stares will still command the lives of the masses of people living on the planetary surface. The main difference will be that power relationships, like fleeting rainbows in the sky, can be cast and recast in an instant. The dystopic vision of our future is one in which all six billion of us are trapped huddling on a tiny, globe-sized dot of space, tangled up among the views of a mass of powerful, all-seeing eyes that control our fate remotely and instantaneously, but without ever really touching us.

The dystopic visions of philosophers, artists, filmmakers, and writers should not necessarily be construed as dooming us to a future filled with techno-gloomy realpolitik, but there is no question that the technologies I have discussed in this chapter, along with many others that are on the way (quantum computing and
nanotechnology, to name two), have the potential to produce revolutionary changes in our lives. Many of these developments are possible not just because our species has a clever mind for inventing gadgets but also because we possess a perceptual and cognitive architecture that has so far found ways to cope with the fragmentations of space that those gadgets have brought about.

Understanding how we are affected by these transformations in how we live in space is perhaps no less urgent than the challenges presented by climate change. We know from our history that, all calls for prudent forethought notwithstanding, whatever we
can
make, we
will
make. The onus is on today’s bright thinkers in science, the humanities, and the arts to try to anticipate and influence for the better the products of our digital constructions.

A
s we crossed a parking lot, my wife and I watched the driver of a parked car roll down his window, toss the wrappers from his fast-food lunch onto the pavement, and then close his window again. Karen, in the kind of gesture that I have come to know very well and to love without limit (in spite of the constant risk that she will cause me to have my head broken), picked up the pile of trash and rapped on his window. When he lowered it, she passed the bag back to him and asked him to take it with him or to find a garbage bin to put it in. He was knocked off balance, which may be what saved me from a broken nose. He took back the bag without comment and drove away. I’m not sure how much time he spent thinking
about this episode, or whether he tossed his garbage out the window again as soon as he had turned the corner. But I do know that this simple transaction preoccupied Karen and me for quite some time. I still think about it and tell people the story, because I think the man’s actions have a larger meaning. It would be easy to write him off as an asocial ignoramus, but there is much evidence that what we saw was not an isolated or unprecedented incident.

We’ve all seen garbage strewn along the edges of highways and in the gutters of city streets. Although we might like to think that some of this mess is accidental—papers blow out of doors and windows of vehicles, garbage cans are upset by wind or animals—we know that at least some of it appears because people deliberately throw it on the ground. Where do they think this garbage goes? It may be that they just don’t think about it at all. Such behavior is a small sign of the way that we mentally divide spaces into inside spaces and outside spaces, treating the boundaries between the two as though they are absolute and impossible to breach. How different is my own behavior when I toss a bag of trash by the side of the curb without a second thought? We have a broad expectation that such things will be “taken care of,” where as far as we’re concerned, this “care” is more a matter of “out of sight, out of mind.”

Modern Western houses, with their steel, dead-bolted doors and thermal windows, may be a recent invention beyond the reach of most of the world’s population, but efforts to build dwellings that enclose, separate, and protect us are as old as any human fossilized remains that we have ever found. Though the walls of our houses are intended to protect us from harsh climates and to afford some privacy, they also have the consequence of erecting an impermeable mental barrier between the interior and the exterior spaces of our world.

As the planet careens toward environmental catastrophe, we are bombarded daily with messages designed to wake us up to the imminent risk that we may exterminate ourselves, along with most other life on the planet. Yet when we hear the word
environment
, we are overwhelmingly likely to think of a natural setting—a forest, a meadow, a range of mountains. In our minds, there is such a cleft between these exterior spaces and the interiors of our homes, offices, and factories that it interferes with our ability to appreciate the urgency of our situation for what it is. Just as the fellow in the parking lot was able to toss his trash out of his car window and excise the problem from his own mind, we behave as though the “problem” of the environment affects only those pristine outdoor settings and has no bearing on the interiors in which we spend most of our lives. Because spaces are completely separated by enclosures, we have difficulty connecting the warm security of our living rooms with the toxic foam floating down a river in the parkland just outside our doors.