Virtual Reality: A Step Towards Immortality?
Image: Unsplash
While biological immortality remains a pursuit of modern science that is yet to be solved, Virtual Reality may well offer a new alternative in the pursuit of longer lives or immortality.
Virtual Reality, is a technology that creates immersive digital environments that people can interact with in ways similar to or completely different from the physical world. This includes the use of VR headsets and controllers, enabling users to effectively transport themselves to a different place, or even become a different person completely.
Types of current VR technologies on the market are as follows:
Non-Immersive VR: This is the most basic form of VR and while it doesn't fully immerse users into a virtual environment, but it allows people to interact with a virtual world through a screen. For example, it is similar to playing a video game on a computer or console, where users can control and manipulate the VR environment using standard input devices like a keyboard, mouse, or game controller.
Semi-Immersive VR: This type of VR allows users view the environment through a large projection screen or multiple TV monitors. Flight simulators are one example of Semi-Immersive VR where users are able sit in a mock cockpit with screens displaying a realistic 3D environment around them.
Fully Immersive VR: This type of VR enables users to wear headset or glasses, which track their motion and adjust the 3D environment in real-time to reflect their actual movements. It is common for handheld controllers or gloves equipped with sensors to interact with the environment to play a part in this technology. Examples include Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR.
Augmented Reality (AR), where digital elements are added to emulate a live view of the real world, and Mixed Reality (MR) combine elements of both VR and AR to allow real-world and digital objects to interact. Further developments are also occurring around haptic feedback devices, which will allow users to feel virtual objects.
The creation of “digital avatars” or virtual representations of oneself, can completely flip on the head how one interacts with their environment and how they’re perceived by others. They almost allow those immersed in the technology to shed their physical self and be reborn in a digital world.
What if technology can along where these avatars could live in the digital space, long after our bodies have failed us. There is a theory that technology could well come about where our consciousness is able to be downloaded into this digital realm, allowing people to live on indefinitely without the need for basic biology as we currently know it.
VR could also allow a person to preserve and revisit memories again if our mind is able to be downloaded to a digital space. Furthermore, if society has the ability to collectively capture historical moments in VR form, it could result in generations going back to revisit firsthand accounts of significant events in a virtual world. This could allow future generations to gain a kind of tangible link to the past. This opens the door to various sociological and ethical questions and how society navigates such issues around identity, consent, and representation in a kind of digital afterlife.
VR technology is still developing and is definitely far from providing a fully immersive, completely lifelike experience that mirrors everyday life as we know it currently… the possibility to transfer or replicate human consciousness in digital form remains an alluring concept to many. However, although VR may not actually offer biological immortality, it could very well forge the path to extend our presence beyond our physical life in a new realm.
