Immersive Illness?

"A challenge that concerns me the most is lurking on the horizon, one we don't yet understand the full scope of. As Immersive Education and other forms of personal virtual reality become more realistic and compelling we're going to see "immersive illness" become more common and more difficult to deal with. Although this is an issue today we're somewhat protected by the limitations of today's personal computers and game consoles (they just aren't powerful enough...yet), but in another decade or more it'll be a different story altogether. Nobody knows exactly what impact insanely realistic, media-rich virtual reality will have on society. We're already dealing with early forms of immersive illness, such as addiction, alienation, mental schisms, and more, but today it's not a problem that affects a large percentage of users. We don't see massive problems today for a number of reasons, including rather low-quality virtual environments and limitations on how much time we spend in these environments. But what happens when the visual and audio quality becomes indistinguishable from reality, the technology becomes truly mainstream, and a substantial portion of education takes place in such environments and not in a real classroom? With massive power comes massive problems. Last week I was asked how big this problem will be, and I responded that nobody knows for sure but I'd estimate that the at-risk population can be calculate by adding the percentage of people with addiction problems to the percentage of society that suffer some form of mental illness. That's a big chunk of society. Is it all gloom and doom? Certainly not, but it's a grand challenge we're not even remotely prepared for today. As with other disruptions society will eventually adapt, but I think we're in for a very rough ride." - Professor Aaron Walsh

Full interview available at http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/05/teaching_in_vr_.html

The idea of "Immersive Illness" sounds advanced for where we are technologically right now, but the future has a lot in store. Microsoft HoloLens and technology of the sort like the Samsung headset in the video are awesome, but so was electronic mail in the 90s. Technology has done a lot of good things for society, but with every good thing comes some bad. I fear it may be possible that any negatives dealing with immersive technology in the future may be worse than the negatives that come with the technology we currently have because it will be so much more advanced and therefore exaggerated.

As Prof. Walsh mentioned a little while ago, sometimes when on Facebook or the internet, we find ourselves occasionally seeing things we wish we had not. This happens to me occasionally, one example is dealing with military pages and things of that nature that I follow on Facebook; I click "like" on these things to show support for the military and keeping us free, but I have encountered multiple times videos being posted that include people being shot, bombs being dropped, etc. Seeing things like this is out of the ordinary and usually disturbing depending on how detailed the videos are. Fast forward 10-15 years, or even 30-50 where we live in a world where Microsoft HoloLens is old news and things like that are the norm, encountering a "video" like this could be exponentially worse, because it would be like standing next to someone being shot or standing in a war zone. This could possibly cause some of the same mental disorders that soldiers suffer from when returning from active duty, and it might only take one mistake like stumbling upon something you wish you had not, but instead of being able to close your web browser, you would be virtually there and unable to get away from it.

Another fear I have is the possibility of addiction which we also touched briefly on before. It is clear that even the technology we have today is too much for some people, causing them to be addicted to a video game or Facebook/things of that nature. If in the future people can put on a pair of goggles and all of a sudden be in another world where they can do what they want and control variables in ways we cannot in the real world, I could see it being a very real problem that people never want to leave the virtual world. What would this cause to happen in the real world? The possibilities are endless, and as great as some of them are such as in the video we watched tonight, some are pretty scary as well.