• by Kaila Colbin , Featured Contributor, September 11, 2015

“Does virtual reality disrupt reality?” That’s the question Singularity University’s David Roberts posed on a sunny spring day in Mountain View.

Roberts had just finished walking us through the story of disruption via the evolution of the spice trade. Spices, he said, were originally traded in order to cover the smell and taste of rotting meat, at a time when we didn’t have other methods of preserving it. But in 1806, when Frederic Tudor figured out how to ship frozen lake ice from New England down to the Caribbean, the spice trade was destroyed.

Not a single company from the spice industry made it into the lake ice industry.

The lake ice industry soared, employing, Wikipedia tells me, some 90,000 people at its peak. But coming down the pike was the manufactured ice industry. Artificial ice produced in factories took off around the turn of the 20th century; by 1914, it had surpassed natural ice. Advertisements of the day extolled the quality and virtues of “plant ice” -- almost indistinguishable, they claimed, from the real thing.

Not a single company from the lake ice industry made it into the plant ice industry.

We don’t tend to see disruption coming. And when Roberts asked whether virtual reality disrupts reality, we must have all looked pretty blank. So he broke it down further. Take just one of our senses, he suggested. Take sight. At what point does virtual reality become so good that it is indistinguishable from reality?

Here, the answer is reasonably straightforward: This happens at the resolution of the human eye. If the information entering your eye and traveling down your optic nerve is as high fidelity as what you see in the real world, if you have the same amount of peripheral vision and the same ability to navigate 3-dimensional space, your brain will not be able to tell the difference.

Right now, our visually immersive devices aren’t quite there yet -- the resolution isn’t quite as good, the peripheral vision isn’t quite as broad. And, because it is only addressing one of our senses, the other senses intrude on the illusion: the weight of the Oculus Rift on our heads; the noise of the real world filtering into the artificial one.

Yet we can see that it’s possible. We’ve gone from VHS tape resolution to HD on-demand, so there’s no reason why the Rift and other devices like it won’t continue to improve in fidelity. And as Roberts says, once that fidelity reaches a certain point, it doesn’t actually matter if it gets any better. Our eyes can only process what they can process.

So that’s vision. All that’s left are the other four senses.

Which brings us to Impacto, a wearable device that lets you feel things in virtual space. As Futurism.com’s Kif Leswing reports, “One application for Impacto is if you’re playing a fighting game, now you can ‘feel’ a blow when you get punched… [T]he same technology could lead to games where people, say, juggle a virtual soccer ball.”

Or it could lead to the ability to physically interact with virtual environments in a manner indistinguishable from real ones. Walk through a forest, you can touch the trees. See a cute kitten, you can reach out and pet it.

Leswing says the tech is “very much in the lab state” and “a bit unwieldy.” But so were cell phones, once upon a time.

Of the remaining senses, sound is already pretty advanced, while smell and taste have yet to be conquered. But there’s no reason they can’t be. So if you’re thinking that virtual reality will never be as good as reality, just remember the plant ice: almost indistinguishable from the real thing.