5 Mundane Things Virtual Reality Is About To Make Awesome

Six Flags was the first theme park to show off the new way tourists would be vomiting all over each other's neon fanny packs when they unveiled their partnership with Samsung to create a virtual reality experience combined with preexisting roller coasters. You simply strap in and put on a VR headset, which projects a movie that syncs with the movements of the roller coaster, because apparently 55 mph upside-down loop-the-loops on a runaway train car were boring us jaded bastards to tears.

The New Revolution VR-coaster is basically an on-rails first-person shooter like House Of The Dead or Time Crisis. Riders dive and careen through a city being invaded by aliens. By tapping on the side of their VR goggles they can shoot the aliens out of the sky, or, more likely, punch themselves in the head with the force of a roller coaster as they try. And while you no longer have to worry about communal plastic gun handles giving you chlamydia, be prepared for what we can only assume will be a huge pink-eye outbreak.

Meanwhile, Acer is working on a VR helmet specifically for theme parks and arcades, and there's a company based in Utah that runs a VR laser-tag park called "The Void" that's going to have an outpost in Times Square by this summer. And that's just the beginning. Since by all accounts this new generation of VR is legit, the tech is probably destined to quickly become a staple of overpriced roadside tourist traps run by sketchy guys with NASCAR-branded sunglasses.

The New York Times is experimenting with that kind of storytelling right now. Anyone with a VR headset, even the simple ones that are just a smartphone in a cardboard box, can experience the unsettling sense of physical presence within the stories they report in virtual reality. The sight of people praying and crying at a vigil honoring the lives lost in the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris is made so much more powerful in VR than as a picture on the front page of a newspaper or a 2D video on a website.

Same goes for this VR report titled "The Displaced," about three refugee children who fled their homelands to escape war and certain death.

Now, the question is, would this make people more empathetic to the struggles of strangers, or would it go the other way and harden the resolve of people who couldn't give a shit about other people's problems? I assume it'd be a mix of the two, with one set becoming hyper-empathetic and another growing ever more callous. And it would have to be an almost super-villainous level of callousness, since they'd be looking the plight and pain in the eyes, to the point where even the Grinch's heart would grow three sizes and still wouldn't be satisfied with the degree of closeness because the goggles don't allow them to tell those people to stop being little bitches and that a little genocide never hurt anyone.

StubHub is developing a virtual reality version of seat previews. Meaning, you won't just get the painfully antiquated picture preview you used to get back in the ancient times (last week). You'll get a fully immersive, cutting-edge, almost-real sense of what it would be like to actually sit in the specific seat you've chosen. It'll be like you're there, in the arena, rubbing your butt on every empty seat. You'll be able to perceive the tangible differences between a $90 seat and the $80 seat a few rows behind it. Now all it needs to do is sit you behind a 6-foot-11 behemoth of a man who has a head the width of an IMAX screen.

Ryan McVay/Photodisc/Getty Images
"If I wanted to see this I would have stayed home and stared at my dick."

Even more exciting is the obvious next step for this idea. Imagine a seat in a stadium or arena specifically for people at home who want to watch a live event through their VR rig. The NBA has already experimented with that idea, and there's a company out there trying to do something similar with live concerts. Who knows? Fifteen years from now we might all be virtually sitting on the 50-yard-line at the Super Bowl, while in reality we're eating nachos naked on a toilet.

And it works. The people behind the technology gathered data from an actual shooting wherein police officers were fired upon and re-created every detail in virtual reality. When they presented their re-creation to the police officers who were involved in the shooting, they couldn't believe how accurate it was.

Since the crime scene re-creation tech is basically the same as the software used to make video games, crime scene re-creators can accurately replicate tiny details like height, distance, and the physical relation between objects and people -- all things needed to obtain a more complete understanding of events. If you've played Batman: Arkham Knight, you've already experienced something like this every time Batman analyzes a crime scene; now you can be happy our real-world justice system has finally caught up to a fictional vigilante.

Rocksteady Studios
*Batman enters women's dressing room and virtually re-creates them undressing*

The tech is still young and isn't yet considered admissible evidence. It's got a lot to prove before it can be used to decide innocence or guilt. I say, why the wait? I mean, truth, justice, and accuracy are important and all, but there's no selling point better than, "This shit makes you Batman."

Long-distance relationships are tricky to navigate. Phone calls, even video chats, aren't a suitable replacement for physical presence. That lack of closeness can rip some couples apart. Luckily, VR simulates physical presence better than anything before it, which bodes well for couples trying to erase the space between them, and surprisingly I'm not even talking about the porn stuff I mentioned before.

Writer Nathan Grayson uses virtual reality to stay in contact with his girlfriend overseas. His experience thus far has been bizarre and touching. Using a VR social network called AltspaceVR, they've been able to establish something that feels akin to an actual physical presence even though their avatars are that of a generic blond guy and a floating ball.

steamed.kotaku.com
This was their Christmas card.

They hold hands, even though they can't feel other's touch. They stare deeply into each other's eyes even though it's all generic cartoon face and floating ball staring back. Somehow, it works. They get something that sounds like and has the mannerisms of the person they miss. It's like they're there, and they don't even have to smell each other's farts, which is a plus for anyone in a long-term relationship.

At one point she glitched out of a room and he continued on adventuring without her, sparking the kind of argument about selfishness a lot of people in relationships have probably had in real life. The most fascinating part was when Grayson's girlfriend was playfully swatting the virtual hand of another man. It was innocent fun. Just two people who couldn't believe something as simple as fake hand slapping could feel so real. But Grayson felt actual jealousy in virtual reality.

The most startling fact to come out of his account is that he's describing a normal relationship. There is no dystopian sci-fi twist that makes it depressing. No one's brain has been uploaded into a VR avatar that's siphoning enough intelligence from the internet to wipe out the human race. They have an ocean between them but remain as close as ever, just in a nontraditional way. Maybe normalcy is the twist. If that's the future we're in for, it doesn't sound too bad. Until someone wearing a VR helmet is struck by lightning and their consciousness becomes the tyrannical overlord of a new world where the line between reality and simulation is blurred. Then we're screwed.

Luis is wearing a sleeping mask and using his good old-fashioned imagination to have fun so robots don't steal his life force. In the meantime, you can find him on Twitter, Tumblr, and on Facebook.

For more from Luis, check out This Article Will Explode In 5 Points and 4 Spam Emails That Deserve To Be Movies.

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