THOUGHTS ON VIRTUAL REALITY

We like to think of virtual reality as an experience made possible by the advent of modern electronic contrivances that permit us to experience events outside our immediate environment. Actually, we've lived and dealt with versions of virtual reality just about as long as mankind has been on earth. Like most human experiences, virtual reality is new only in its manifestations. It is a mode of experience that we've practiced since the emergence of consciousness.

Even Cavemen recognized a world beyond the physical, a world of imagination, evidenced by cave drawings and the imagination to look toward an afterlife and to devise tools for anticipated, that is to say, virtual hunting and defenses activities. Seeing a world not out there, or one projected into the future, or to imagine a hunt or battle not now taking place and, therefore, not based on immediate sensory perception, is to experience reality in a virtual manner.

We might even go so far as to say that all art is a form of virtual reality. If an artist paints what he sees, however that appearance may vary from everyday perception, he is drawing a reality nontheless and in sharing that perception leads us into a virtual world, too.