Oculus Rift For Reality: Under the Surface

First, They come to your neighborhood with a horde of biologists and chemists and environmental scientists and a host of other experts in various fields, to pre-map things. Afterward, you’d put on the device and walk down your street. Everything would be identical to what you’d see with your own eyes...except you’d also see the chemical signals in the air from beetles and plants, pheromone trails laid down by ants, and every other bit of the natural world’s communications hidden from us by our primitive five senses. You’d also see every trace of pesticide and traces in puddles of water of run-off and invisible carcinogens and other human-made intercession on the landscape. It would be overwhelming at first, especially since this would come with simulated approximations of how you might experience these things, still bound by your own puny senses, so you’d have to get over cognitive dissonance.Once you got used to it, maybe you’d go with more advanced settings. Like, you’d look at the ground and it’d open up its layers, past topsoil and earthworms down into the deeper epidermis, so to speak, until you’re overcoming a sense of vertigo, because even though you’re standing right there, not falling at all, below you everything is revealing itself to you superfast. And maybe then, while still staring at the ground, you’d have an option to regress to simulations of the same spot five years, ten years, fifty years, two hundred years ago…until when you look up again there’s no street at all and you’re in the middle of a forest and there are more birds and animals than you could ever imagine because you’ve never seen that many in one place. You’ve never even seen this many old-growth trees before. You’ve never known that the world was once like this except in the abstract.When you come back, the game’s over. The initial experience would only last 10 or 15 minutes because we’re talking about a real onslaught of sensory information that requires time to process, followed by longer and more complex sessions. A basic initial session might strip away certain layers of experience for a more gradual immersion over a period of six sessions. By that time, there may be enough of an overlay through the user’s imagination that walking through the same area evokes a simulation of the experience without the equipment: sensory pop-ups in the brain based on the prior immersions.If enough people play the game right and understand what it means, you, your children, your grandchildren, and your great grandchildren live long lives and everybody continues to be able to have things like electricity, which makes using devices like a future Oculus a lot easier.Otherwise, it’s just a dead helmet sitting atop of a head full of rotted meat.[Reddit username JeffVanderMeer; I am that dude.]