“It is a pair of goggles through which you see a totally different world where the story is all about you and you are in it.” If you read this text in 2017, you may have assumed it to be the advertisement of the latest virtual reality, or VR, headset. However in 1935 people read a similar text in Stanley Weinbaum’s scientific fiction Pygmalion's Spectacles. Amazed at the eye-opening imagination, few would have imagined it to become reality in the near future. We live in such an age that things that appeared in scientific fictions merely a few decades ago have been making themselves part of our everyday lives. Ecstasy, first, then anxiety ensues — in the face of VR technology where is the boundary between the real world and the virtual world? Are we still authentic human beings if one day we spend more time in the virtual world than in the ‘real’ world?
The Factory of Virtual Fantasies
Chinese workers are fabricating glamorous online identities. But is a virtual existence as dangerous as we think?
Issue 57, 31st July 2017
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