VIRTUAL REALITY
This morning I woke up in my recliner at 7 a.m. with a view out the wide window to the porch and the valley and the mountains beyond. Suddenly I felt very good simply to be here, simply to be alive. Soon I won’t be here, not here forever, just as I wasn’t here for 13 billion years. It suddenly didn’t matter that I wasn’t here and missed out on those 13 billion years or that I won’t be here for the next 13 billion years. I am here looking out the window at the awakening life all around me, the trees that will soon have leaves, the greening grass, the rain filled clouds. I am part of this drive to be alive everywhere around me and it feels good.
That view has been there since we bought the house 35 years ago, changing with the seasons as it is changing now. Just looking at it brings a feeling of calm, of peacefulness, of letting go of everything. So I try an experiment. I go onto the back porch and take a panorama of my view with my iPhone and then air drop it to my new Vision Pro and look at it first as a large flat rectangle and then in an immersive form so that as I sit here in my quiet house it stretches far above me and down below and the wraps around me so that I have to turn my head all the way to the left to see the edge of the view and all the way to the right to see the other edge. I am back on my back porch again while sitting in my living room, but now I am immersed in my view which wraps around me
And then I carry the experiment further. On the Vision Pro I look at the white mountains icon labeled environments and have my choice of views in separate round circles. I look at Joshua Tree and touch my forefinger to my thumb in my lap. And suddenly, with a faint wind blowing, I am on a rock with with the desert stretching to the horizon all around me. When I twist the button on the top of the goggles the room I am in vanishes and no matter where I look, straight down at the rock, straight up at the sky with white feathery clouds or when I rotate my chair and look behind me to the hill of rocks behind me and the sun on the mountains I am completely immersed in the desert.
All the talk I have heard about virtual reality, I am now experiencing it.
I click on the button on the top of the goggles and the choices of environments in round circles reappears. I look at the Yosemite circle and touch my finger to my thumb in my lap and suddenly the stone face of a mountain rises thousands of feet directly above me. I am in deep white snow with a forest of straight pines circling me and mountains in front of me and behind me. The wind blows quietly and again I can look straight up at clouds drifting through a blue sky and straight down at the snow, feeling in complete peace as the wind blows softly.
I have about five choices of places where I can enter an environment that brings complete calm including sitting on the moon with the craters of the moon around me.
There is a qualitative difference between my iPhone panorama and the completely encircling Apple photographs taken with very expensive multiple cameras. There is a difference in sharpness and the feeling of reality, but the overall sensation is the same. This Apple virtual reality feels absolutely real.
And when I turn the knob back again that reality disappears and this time it is my living room that is absolutely real. I know it is real because I am sitting in it, but what I am seeing is not my living room, my eyes are covered with goggles, it is my living room in virtual reality that I see from an inch away.
And then in a very odd experiment that I can’t explain at all I can put the panorama of my mountain view on a flat screen that floats in front of me, crystal clear, ten feet wide and five feet high, placed in my virtual living room, and with the glasses still on I can stand up and walk right through the virtual screen, which stays where it is in my virtual living room. And as I walk across the virtual room where I can touch things as I walk by, touching virtual objects with my fingers, I can look back and see the back of the screen, a white rectangle which stays put until I walk back through it again and sit down and see the panorama of my view.
Coming back to the feeling I had this morning of peace as I looked out at my view I realize that I can have the same feeling of peace from sitting in the Joshua Tree desert or sitting in Yosemite, or even sitting on the moon.
True, my body after doing this and being fooled so badly rebels a little and I feel queasy. When my vision is turned upside down like this my body has trouble going along. But in spite of that, the feeling is marvelous and is the virtual world that we will all soon be entering.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 