Among the best challenges for developing a feeling of “presence” has long been real obstructions like your couch. Now, a number of firms are assembling apparatus built to allow you to go freely set up.

“I put on the head-mounted display and that I used to be really disappointed because all I saw were fat pixels. You know, nothing was fascinating,” says Mel Slater, a professor in the University of Barcelona as well as a world specialist in virtual reality (VR). “I was in an area. I could make out that much. But then somebody said ‘transfer your head,’ as well as the minute I moved my head, unexpectedly I was actually in an area, and that I heard sounds and that I really could see as I moved my head about.”

“I used a mouse button or a wand button to float over to the window, I looked out of the window, there was a boat down below on some water,” he continues. “I began floating down towards the boat. And then I heard someone say ‘your time is up.’ They took off the head-mounted display and that I used to be quite shocked to be back in this light, realistic reality.”

As a new wave of virtual reality peripheral equipent, including the much-talked-about Oculus Rift, gets press interest and a large number of preorders, encounters like Slater’s seem set to eventually become a growing number of common. Nevertheless, the amazing thing is the fact that his dreamlike narrative of feeling unexpectedly immersed in a virtual room is over 20 years old. It was, actually, Slater’s first ever experience of virtual reality; the very first time he ever experienced the sensation called “presence” — the feeling of “really being there,” or, as he describes it, “place illusion.”

I also have felt really present in a virtual environment. I have looked out over a gaping chasm, heard the wind wail within my ears, and felt my heartbeat quicken even though, cognitively, I could remind myself that it was all just pixels and audio files. But understanding this visceral awareness of existence has been available for decades raises a question about virtual reality’s long and tortured struggle to be taken as a mainstream type of amusement: Why the hiatus? Why has the magic of VR been confined for so long to occasional demos and laboratory research, essentially immobilized in academic obscurity?

Having talked to a number of programmers and proponents of VR, the consensus appears to be twofold. To begin with, the price of the hardware has, previously, been astronomic. A few of the most recent gadgets continue to be priced well above a consumer-friendly degree, including the IGS Glove, a peripheral developed by Synertial (previously Animazoo) which enables your virtual hand to bend and move just like your actual hand, right down to complex finger movements.

Mark Lewis, head of sales at Synertial, framed the glove in my experience as “a business product.” For instance, auto manufacturer Skoda is utilizing it to study how engineers on the production line manipulate mechanical parts during construction. Nevertheless, he included that Synertial was additionally “investigating” prospective consumer versions of the glove that might interest a modern VR market.

Second, and perhaps most clearly, seamless, high quality VR continues to be difficult to generate. Existence, although briefly extreme, is regarded as quite simple to interrupt, thus the VR term “break in presence,” or BIP for short. “The program must prevent you in this other world. That is extremely delicate,” Sebastien Kuntz, founder of software firm “I am in VR,” said to me, describing his conservatism about the present renewed interest in VR as an entertainment platform. Kuntz mentions several forms of technology which he says come close to enhancing VR but which, ultimately, might really result in a break in existence more frequently than not because they haven’t been designed thoughtfully enough.

By way of example, he mentions the frequent insufficient curiosity about developing successful soundtracks for VR programs. “If the sound is really great you don’t have to have to [worry about creating] better graphics because the senses compensate one another,” he says. He adds that reaching photorealism inside the virtual environment just isn’t essential when inducing a feeling of existence, a number of key perceptions should just be provoked in the correct manner.

But the biggest challenge for virtual reality has always been motion. The action of just walking around a virtual space remains limited by the inconvenient correlation coefficient of the virtual room to the actual room where a VR user is standing. This exact issue, however, is one which a varied variety of new peripherals is expecting to undertake.

There is the Omni, a sort of fixed grooved dish and harness you could walk and run on (your feet constantly come back to the exact same place); the recently established WizDish, a similar but more affordable theory which uses anti-friction studded shoes; and eventually the complex VirtuSphere, a 10-foot high hollow ball which encases the VR player within its spherical layout.

All of these, nevertheless, have limits. Jan Goetgeluk, inventor of the Omni, declares the harness which comes together with the apparatus means quite fit gestures or behaviour for example crawling aren’t potential. “You’re not gonna play soccer on the Omni for example,” he remarks. However, the apparatus is an exciting part of the correct path. In their now on-going Kickstarter start, Goetgeluk and his team have procured nearly $1 million of bunch-sourced funds.

“We’ve been doing this Half Life 2 demo,” Goetgeluk told me, remembering a promotion at E3 earlier this month. “At some point we see enemies plus they begin throwing grenades at you. Everyone, when they see that grenade coming, everyone just begins sprinting. Itis a natural reaction, it feels real. You want to begin sprinting, your brain thinks you are there, it is really extreme.”

The WizDish can also be seeking financial backing in the group. Having attempted the WizDish, I could report the sense of “walking” by sliding one’s feet back and forth on a low-friction stage is unusual but powerful enough to indicate that one is going more naturally by way of a virtual environment. For users of the VirtuSphere, there’s a tradeoff between having the ability to walk “in a natural way, in any direction,” and being unable to stand close to other players, according to among its originators, Allan Latypov.

One kit, Job Holodeck, has tried to unite various peripherals as a way to improve the VR experience. Its programmers have created simulations where players (enveloped in gear including translation trackers, the Oculus Rift, controls as well as a laptop in a backpack) work together to defeat objects in the virtual universe.

James Iliff, producer, says, “Users can reach out and hit their buddies’ arm in the virtual universe, as well as their buddy is physically there in reality. They are able to have sword fights, and fire at each other, and work collectively to fight enemies.”

But all of the approximations of walking effort to capitalize on the classic knowledge of existence which Kuntz and Slater discussed during dialogue: It does not have to be perfect to feel absolutely actual.

As Julian Williams, inventor of the WizDish, set it himself: “If you can simplify things so that your mind thinks they’re happening, your brain seems to be very plastic and very able to accept it.”

The exact same plasticity is the essential element in among the very interesting things about virtual reality: not it is likely to convince the user of being in another location, but to convince them that they possess another self.

“It’s one thing to change the world you’re in so that you perceive yourself to be above a great abyss, that’s interesting, but when you turn into a lobster or something, that’s really profound,” says Jaron Lanier, someone who experimented with VR in its first incarnations and who has possibly become its most well known proponent.

He tells me about a VR program he experimented with in his 20s which entailed “trading eyes with a lover,” an environment in which, “you look at each other’s eyes and you have to learn to coordinate a shared body.” He giggles as he envisions the “social problems” that could appear in a future where we all begin experimenting with such things.

But behind that laughter is a point of earnestness for Lanier. He says that much of his present-day technology criticism, like that in his 2010 novel, You AreN’t a Gadget, comes straight from his knowledge that Virtual Reality has this possibility to be such a radically transformative encounter.

“Seeing how readily people can be manipulated by virtual worlds has helped me, I think, develop a healthy sensibility of just how potent these tools can be,” he says when I ask him specifically in regards to the emotional ramifications of the feeling of “presence.” Really, Lanier talks about VR using a interesting mixture of delight and dread, occasionally calling it “cosmic,” but now and again indicating theoretical adverse results.

“There’s a real tension here for me,” he clarifies, “between the incredible beauty and power of this stuff and also the potential for humanity to confuse itself.”

Some experimental confusion, however, is just what Mel Slater attempts to reach daily in his research. Lately he’s published papers on giving individuals alternative bodies and documenting the effects on their behavior. As an example, it seems that a VR user who’s given a “Jimi Hendrix”-like body will play the drums more enthusiastically than someone whose avatar is a light-skinned man wearing a suit.

Relatedly, in a number of his latest study on the topic, Slater has investigated how white or light-skinned VR users would experience brief changes in racial prejudice (measured via implied organization testing) when they were given avatars with different skin colours in the virtual universe.

“The incredible thing is — not for long, I’m talking about ten minutes — you give them this implicit racial bias test again, the scores change,” he clarifies. “The ones you’ve put in a dark body have a lower racial bias than the ones you put in a white body or a blue body.”

Underpinning all of the experiments is a 20-year career of attempting to find what’s important to attain existence. Slater’s experiments with body morphology are in many ways dependent on existence not being busted. He tells me about one experiment that his team attempted which called for mimicking a barfight. Participants in early variants of the surroundings who watched the scene unfold had an unexpectedly flat result. Why? Because, they said, “a fight like that would never happen in a bar that looks like this.”

It is an anecdote that brings home the fragility of existence, the fact it’s really dependent on numerous variables: our many perceptions, our sophisticated anticipations of the planet around us. In virtual reality, a selection of stimulation compete to convince the brain of a built perceptual reality, but that perception is in the mercy of the nerve susceptibility making existence potential in the very first place: We may feel, hear, or see a thing that loses us right back to the cognitive reality that is completely conscious that that which we perceive is but a brilliant lie.

Stuart Cupit, cofounder of London-headquartered technology studio Inition, has been experimenting with VR demos for years and is intensely conscious of the technological constraints which coexist, as they’ve consistently done, alongside captivating science fiction fantasies of what might one day be possible.

For Cupit, the crudeness of what’s still somewhat clunky, “strap on hardware” stays clear. “What you want to be doing,” he says, “is tricking the senses at a base level.”

And is not that the essence of the virtual? It definitely appears to be what rests behind this strong line from The Matrix (1999): “How would you define ‘real’? In the event you are talking in what it is possible to feel, what you are able to smell, what you can taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”

And Cupit, though excited about the way in which the area is growing, is, like most long term professionals, informed of what still must be performed prior to the complete concentration offered by something similar to The Matrix is even possible. “We’ve got to realize that the peripherals we’re seeing now aren’t the ones our kids will grow up using,” he asserts. “These are the embryonic steps towards a new way of interacting with media.”

To date, the story of virtual reality is still little higher than the usual history of many embryonic measures. But tantalizing chances to feel existence, even for short seconds, have been there throughout. This alone has propelled so many now working in the area. They’ve narratives both of these early experiences as well as their following dreams of how to make VR more secure and much more reachable.