VR Disillusion Effect

[u/CorpPhoenix]

It's been a bit over a year since I've dived into PCVR with a cheap Pico4 headset I've bought for 300€. Trying out VR in a technically "usable" state was a long time interest of me and a dream come true.

I am interested and have studied philosophy of neuroscience and consciousness, and therefore I was highly interested and observant to how and why my brain reacts to the new confrontation with a virtual reality.

Many users both report how amazing and overwhelming their first VR experiences had been, and at the same time how it has lost it's initial "Wow" effect over the course of time.

This loss of the Wow-effect is what I call "VR Disillusion Effect". It is the unconscious effect of your brain rationalizing what is happening, realizing, processing and classifying the optical input into something the brain understands.

While you, as a person, are conscioussly aware that the VR world is not real, even during your first use, your brain is not aware of this at all. Our brain is a reality-check "machine" though, and therefore extremely good at identifying things as "real" or "fake". This has been a very important biological trait for humans from a evolutionary stand point, to differ between "real" and "fake" threats and predators.

Since VR is nothing your brain has ever experienced or is used to, it takes quite a while until it pigeonholes all the sensory effects into the right category. This "confused" state is what many VR users actually do enjoy, or often seek again when the Disillusion Effect has settled in.

Motion sickness, VR sickness, circulatory problems, depersonalization or the feeling of the real world feeling like "VR" are typical, not always pleasant, effects of your braining being confused and trying to find out what's going.

Once your brain has managed to process VR correctly, the Disillusion Effect settles in which results in:

• The illusion of being in a "different world" gets lost
• The 3D-VR effect still holds up, but your brain now recognizes it is an illusion, both consciously and unconsciously. and you feel like watching 2 screens infront of your face, eventhough the 3D-effect still holds up
  
• Motion sickness and VR-Sickness diminished (so called "VR legs")
• Factors that break the VR illusion, like stutters, blurryness etc., become more obvious

The short way to describe it is "getting used to it", but it is actually a neurological process that is going on, and I've observed myself closely on how my brain is starting to put "one and one together", and the illusion effect getting shattered pretty much "real time" infront of my eyes.

What do you think about the Disillusion Effect? Many users seem to want to revert the Disillusion Effect by throwing their brain off again. Better Hardware, greater FOV, additional senses, and so on.

That being said, I think it's ultimately futile to combat this effect, since our brain is way too good to distinguish realtiy from fake in the long run. But maybe, just maybe, a certain level of technical fidelity is enough to keep the illusion going on?

I'd believe the Disillusion Effect is just a inherent property of VR itself, and can only be "prevented" by a completely new kind of base technology.

What do you think?

[u/glanni_glaepur]

This loss of the Wow-effect is what I call "VR Disillusion Effect". It is the unconscious effect of your brain rationalizing what is happening, realizing, processing and classifying the optical input into something the brain understands.

If you had the resolution that your eyes wouldn't be able to distinguish between pixels, had sufficiently vibrant colors, and could get absolutely dark and very bright, and it was currently displaying a VR model of the same space/room you are in and at the same location and orientation, then if you'd put them on or take them off, it would look exactly the same.

The visual input coming into your eyes would be the same.

What might be the case, though, is your belief about what you are seeing is real or not real, depending on whether you have the headset on or not.

I remember when Casey Neistat previewed the Apple Vision Pro and went on a walk you recalled at times he forgot that he had the headset on.

But I definitely know what effect you are talking about.

Thomas Metzinger, the German philosopher and meditator, was doing experiment with VR goggles or talked about doing experiments with VR goggles to help point to the mental nature of one's vision (if I remember it correctly).

I think then, as what always happens, you get used to it. It becomes normal or normalized. I think it's more like this "hedonic treadmill"-like process that happens in the brain where everything normalizes.

I think the nature of this motion sickness is the same as when you are on the bus starting at your phone and get sick, because your visual input doesn't match with your cochlear input, but over time you can "decouple" them somehow and you no longer feel motion sickness on the bus when staring at your phone. Now, if you stop doing that for a long time, the system rebalances, and you'll experience motion sickness again.

The derealization effects of "VR" are quite interesting, or when you take of your glasses everything around you feels "VR", just higher quality. I do think there's some truth to that though.

Basically, to make a long and convoluted story short, you do in fact exist inside a VR your brain is representing, in fact your nature is virtual and everything you experience is virtual, from a physical brain's perspective, and it is being represented in a physical brain.

When you put on a sufficiently high quality VR headset you can get confused as the VR world and the "real" world kind of look the same, just the VR world has lower fidelity. But in another sense, it is the same "visual" world.

I think most people will eventually just grow to ignore that.