Over the past couple of years, with the introduction of the Apple Vision Pro and the Meta Quest 3, I've become a believer in the potential of mixed reality.
First, and this was a big concern for me, it's possible to use VR headsets without barfing. Second, some of the applications are truly amazing, especially the entertainment. While the ability to watch a movie on a giant screen is awesome, the fully immersive 3D experiences on the Vision Pro are really quite compelling.
In this article, I'm going to show you a technology that has the potential of definitively obsoleting VR devices like the Vision Pro and Quest 3. But first, I want to recount an experience I had with the Vision Pro that had a bit of a reality-altering effect.
Then later, when we discuss the Stanford research, you'll see how they might expand on something like what I experienced and take it far beyond the next level.
Also: These XR glasses gave me a 200-inch screen to work with
There's a Vision Pro experience called Wild Life. I watched the Rhino episode from early 2024 that told the story of a wildlife refuge in Africa. While watching, I really felt like I could reach out and touch the animals; they were that close.
But here's where it gets interesting. Whenever something on TV shows someplace I've actually been to in real life, I have an internal dialog box pop up in my brain that says, "I've been there."
So, some time after I watched the Vision Pro episode on the rhino refuge, we saw a news story about the place. And wouldn't you know it? My brain said, "I've been there," even though I've never been to Africa. Something about the VR immersion indexed that episode in my brain as an actual lived experience, not just something I watched.
To be clear, I knew at the time it wasn't a real experience. I currently know that it wasn't a real-life lived experience. Yet some little bit of internal brain parameterization still indexes it in the lived experiences table rather than the viewed experiences table.
Also: I finally tried Samsung's XR headset, and it beats my Apple Vision Pro in meaningful ways
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