Spoiler Alert - the following contains a detailed account of Dali Cybernetics VR experience.
As promised, here is the follow-up to yesterday's Dali Cybernetics review. The main exhibition was over, with only the finale remaining. I left the zen room with my friend and we emerged into a small foyer where VR headsets were attached to the heads of visitors. Before we were fitted with one, we were instructed to read a set of guidelines warning of side effects, dizziness, along with ominous disclaimers such as, 'what you are about to see is not real', 'you will encounter other people as a diving helmet, do not push them.' I was mildly intrigued by this point, but not yet excited or hyped up for what was about to happen.
I should preface the following experience by asserting that I'm a naturally dour, cynical sort of person and usually quite difficult to impress. Anyone who follows my book review blog will know that I hate nearly everything. I hold art to unrealistically high standards, and I become pickier with every passing year. I was fully expecting my headset to malfunction, as is usually the case for me whenever I experience any kind activity that requires working technology, whether it be laser tag or dodgems. I have long scoffed at the idea of VR and had no interest in trying it, dismissing it as an overpriced gimmick at best. I have never been more wrong.
After skimming over the guidelines, I was approached by a smiling woman who unceremoniously jammed a headset over my head, ushered me through a doorway, and onto the Ship of Dreams. There were no adjustments made to the headset, it was plonked on and tightened before I even knew what was happening. No sensitivity tweaking, no interpupillary distance tracking, just wham, bam, good to go. This was my first time in VR. Visibility was clearer than I expected it to be, although by no means crystal clear. I could probably have adjusted that, but I was so overwhelmed by everything that the slight blur did not present an issue. The feel and heft of the headset was comfortable and well balanced.
I did not immediately know what was going on. I noticed that my friend, who had gone on ahead of me, was only a floating copper diving helmet, the old fashioned sort worn by early aquanauts. I did not yet know that we were on the deck of a sailing ship. It took me rather longer than it should have done to realise that I too, was only a floating head. Looking down at my body and realising it wasn't there was an intensely surreal, Kafkaesque, and discombobulating feeling that cannot be adequately described to somebody who has not experienced it. I had to keep groping for my torso, to reassure myself that I still had one.
I instantly thought of media in which somebody wakes up to find that parts of their body have disappeared or transformed. The Metamorphosis, Johnny Got His Gun, Boxing Helena, Robocop, Mars Attacks!, Rust and Bone, Tusk. All of those films raced through my decapitated head as I struggled to come to terms with this new existence. My friend was in a similar state of mild panic and awe. It was he who brought my attention to the fact that I also had hands. I raised them for a better look and saw they were gilded copper - liquid gloves melded to my flesh. Like a baby discovering that it has control over its hands and spends hours gazing at them in fascination, I turned them over and over, staring in admiration, examining the smooth, cauterised cutoff point at the wrists.
So here I was, nothing more than a floating diving helmet and a pair of coppery gloves. For a while, I did not take in my surroundings, being too absorbed in adjusting to this strange new experience. My friend asked me to put my hands out, and he placed his palms against mine, probably to reassure himself that we were still there, still relevant. We had numbers beneath our helmets to identify one another from the other people sharing the space with us. I was 3, and I felt like I was that age again, experiencing the world for the first time.
A metal railing ran around the length of the room, and I was drawn to this as a solid anchor point. The railing was real and reacted to my touch with reassuring solidity, a counterbalance to my ethereal form. I clung to it like somebody going rollerskating for the first time, and shakily dragged myself deeper into the room. I was amazed at how accurate the hand tracking was. When I clasped the railing, my metallic hands did likewise. Nothing else was real. It was time to survey my surroundings, and this is where the true immensity of VR hit me. Had it not been for the headset, my monocle might have popped out in sheer alarm.
I was on the deck of a wooden ship, with a mast in the centre, at the top of which billowed a white, square canvas sail, snapping in the breeze. I could have spent the entire time staring at this sail, marvelling at its dimensions. I could have spent the entire time admiring my hands. The sense of scale was not something I had anticipated. But there were other sights demanding my attention. A giant egg stood at the base of the mast, impeccably rotund, impossibly unreal, evocative of Dali's 'Metamorphosis of Narcissus.' I did not try to touch it. My attention was drawn beyond the guardrail of the ship, to a calm, undulating sea, almost milky white. I looked behind myself for the first time, and was shocked to discover the door I had entered through had disappeared, replaced by the poop deck of the ship.
This was the first major revelation, the moment I knew I was physically inhabiting this virtual world, not simply sat before a screen. Objects in the environment had real scale, I could walk seamlessly from one side of the deck to the other, I could turn 360 degrees and see everything rendered perfectly. I was actually on the ship, there was no going back. This was mind blowing, and the infinite possibilities of VR flew through my mind. My incredulity expressed itself in words, and I blurted out my discoveries. It is impossible to retain a degree of composure and dignity when experiencing VR for the first time. I was gibbering excitedly like a child, pointing out everything I saw.
My advice to anyone wanting to try VR is to leave your cynicism and ego behind, allow yourself to be transported, and embrace an infant's eye view of the world. Allow yourself those emotions of joy, euphoria, amazement, fear. Remember what it is to be small and insignificant again. Immerse and unbound yourself. There is no judgement in VR. Perhaps the employees watching us were amused by a roomful of grown adults behaving like children, but that's how things were.
I watched the passing landscape, a dreamlike vista far more compelling than any real world cruise. 'I am actually inside a Dali dreamscape', I told myself. As a teenager poring over Dali's paintings in art class at school, never in my wildest imaginings could I have dreamt that one day I would be inside one of them. Never. But here I was, sailing the seas, on the deck of a ship, next to a giant immaculate egg, with strange rock formations gliding by.
We hit a wave and the deck shuddered beneath our feet. I grabbed onto the rail with both hands as water sprayed over me, I felt its wetness. I don't know if this actually happened, or my brain tricked me into believing it did, but other visitors reacted likewise. I suspect we really were sprayed with water at that point. It was then that I remembered the darker elements of Dali's paintings. Evocative, weirdly beautiful, and compelling yes, but they could also be terrifying. Something was coming.
From the portside of the ship, closest to where I stood, an immense red claw loomed over the side. It was closely followed by another, the pincers of a gargantuan lobster, each as big as a fridge. I shouted out to my friend, who had his back to it and had not yet noticed. The head and twitching antennae of the lobster appeared. A claw moved towards me, as though to snatch me from the deck. I knew it was not real, yet my brain could not stop my body from instinctively cringing away.
I cowered like a sailor who had come face to face with a sea monster. At that moment, I was a character from Mysterious Island, facing off against the giant crab. After menacing us with its pincers, the lobster leapt out of the sea and sailed over the ship. I looked up and saw its segmented underbelly blotting out the sky, then it splashed back into the sea on the starboard side and was gone. This was incredible. Again, I was overwhelmed by the possibilies, as excited as a child on a school trip.
What happened after that point was a blur of disordered memories and excited impressions that I struggle to organise into a logical sequence. The voyage was split into three sections, and we were nearing the end of the seabound portion. Cliffs rose into view, flanking a narrow passage which would barely admit the ship. I gazed in awe at the towering cliff faces as they took on mythic proportions, feeling like Odysseus approaching the cliffs of Scylla, or Jason with his Argonauts passing through the Clashing Rocks.
The cliffs swept by, I was humbled, dwarfed. I did not know where to look. Everywhere, something wondrous and mesmerising was taking place, I wanted to see it all at once. My dreams have always been of the most vivid kind, but not one of them came close to this. We were leaving the cliffs behind now and sailing through a desert. A giant folded clock had appeared on deck, straight out of 'The Persistance of Memory.' We were standing on the clock face as its massive 3D hands ticked over our heads. But there were other things happening elsewhere and I could not look in any one place for long.
On the horizon, a line of Dali's long-legged elephants from The Temptation of Saint Anthony were marching across this fractured landscape. The ship drew closer to the line of distorted pachyderms. I do not remember much music or sound from the experience so far, but now there was the discordant squeal of trumpeting elephants. Then we were beneath them as they strode over the ship on impossibly long, spindly legs. Far, far above, higher than the lobster had been, their bellies went by, towering into the clouds. I was in a visual coma, staring stupefied at the sheer majesty of it all.
At some point after this particular spectacle was over, I noticed that the clock on deck was gone and had been replaced by the giant stump of a guttering candle. The flame looked so real, like I could reach out and burn my hand, but still I did not venture to touch it. It felt profane to do so. I heard the panicked cries of other visitors. At the bow of the ship, giant ants were invading. In true Dali fashion, their segmented bodies had visible gaps between the component parts. On of the ants turned it attention to the ship and rushed at us with clicking mandibles. Now it was Land of the Giants, a favourite TV show from my childhood.
I looked behind me, and the candle had grown. Rather than melting, it was steadily growing taller, rising up alongside the mast, a proud, phallic column dripping with wax that puddled at its base. Incredible. We were surrounded by fireflies, I saw people trying to touch them, forgetting that they were in a simulation. Then we were surrounded by floating orbs, which became eyeballs. We were ogled from all sides by hundreds of them. I felt naked and exposed before the all-seeing, penetrating gaze of a higher being.
The desertscape was sucked into a vortex, and we were in space, hurtling toward an unknown destiny. Stars and comets whizzed by. Enormous monoliths and heads of statues rolled at us through the cosmos, sometimes threatening to obliterate our tiny vessel. I gazed upon the faces of angels, but here my memory disintegrates the most, for this section of the voyage was sheer abstract surrealism and beyond the realm of understanding. I was undergoing a profound spiritual ephiphany. I felt like I was in the presence of God and nothing on Earth would ever be the same again. I did not want to leave, I did not want it to end. Already I was calculating how I could remain in the simulation and experience it all over again. I was planning my return.
During the space section, I lost all sense of time, place, and being. I was at one with the cosmos, witnessing glimpses of Creation itself. I imagined how Dali would have felt, seeing his creations coming alive in this manner. No doubt he would have been thrilled, he would himself have likely pioneered this technology had he lived long enough. It had happened - I was finally impressed by that which I had always shunned.
I saw myself some years from now, a VR junkie, living my life inside these fascinating worlds. I could curl up on deck and stare slack-jawed at the Heavens, as lost and enraptured as any opium addict in the fume-ridden dens of old. The real world held no allure now. I had 'touched the face of God' and transcended the bounds of my mortal shell. Why have a body when I could be a brain in a jar, a head in VR? My overactive imagination jumped ahead and showed me my lifeless corpse being carried from the house, VR set still attached, a line of dribble from the corner of my mouth. It would not be a bad way to go.
I don't remember the end of the dazzling show, but at some point the dreamscape faded and we were inside a wire mesh, Tron-like cube. I didn't realise that it had ended and we were supposed to leave. My mind had been fried, and from this point on, I would exist only as a passive avatar. Visitors were leaving through a hidden door. I became convinced that I had missed the start of the whole thing, as indignant as an addict, angry that the staff had tried to cheat me. I wanted to stay for the next rotation. I noticed that one of the diving helmets had half sunk into the floor of the virtual space, like Robin Williams trapped in the floorboards on Jumanji. Perhaps this particular guest had succumbed to virtual reality, become assimilated into its cybernetic framework?
Eventually, all good things must end, and against my will I was drawn to the exit. Once in the portal, four grid walls closed in around me, boxing me in with nowhere to go. Before I could get fully claustrophic, there was a flash of blinding light, the light at the end of the tunnel, and the same woman who had strapped my headset on was pulling it off. I was back in the dreary foyer of the exhibition, blinking in stupefaction. My body was back, but my mind was forever altered.
In a daze, I went through the motions of visiting the bathroom and ambling through the gift shop, chatting non-stop about the encounter. I saw Dali jigsaw puzzles for sale. Who on earth would want to buy a 2D jigsaw puzzle after experiencing that? Once outside, I saw with bitterness the bleak and hideous grey of the real world. I felt slightly nauseous and my head pounded, although that could have been the effects of only drinking coffee on an empty stomach. My friend complained of a similar sickness, and we located a park close at hand where we could 'touch grass.'
One of the trees was planted upside down, with its branches in the ground and its roots soaring into the sky. I pointed it out, to see if my friend could see it too. He could. Perhaps part of our minds were still locked away in the simulation? The comedown was intense. The oppressive environment of East London was appalling to one who had so recently soared with angels and clung from the very fabric of the Multiverse. I was about to sit down on the grass when I noticed a pile of dog shit. Yes, we were definitely back in the real world.
This profound spiritual awakening, so unexpected, but not unwelcome in my Autumn years, immediately set me to work researching consumer-friendly headsets. The one we used was an industry model known as HTC VIVE Focus 3. It has a lot of nice specs and features, including hand tracking and a fitted cooling fan, but comes with a hefty price tag and is typically reserved for the workforce. A more compatible and affordable choice would be the PSVR2, but I wanted to know how it compared to what I had been through. So far, I have been unable to find anybody familiar with both headsets. This relatively new era of tech does not enable the average consumer to afford more than one.
Ideally, I would like somebody who uses PSVR2 to visit the Dali exhibition and offer an honest comparison. Have I really touched the face of God, or am I simply a starstruck initiate with so much more to look forward to? I sincerely hope it's the latter, but either way, I could not be more pleased by the manner in which I lost my VRginity. I'm not ashamed to admit how wrong I was about VR. At the ripe old age of 38, I thought there was nothing left in the world that could surprise me, but VR has done so much more than that. The possibilites to use it for a better world are too numerous to list here; that would be a discussion for another day. Right now, the future is here - one must simply reach out and grasp it...
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