"You actually have to remind yourself not to believe"

2014-10-09

[Virtual Reality] is the last medium. We’re at the very beginning of it, but version 147 is The Matrix or Total Recall. Our brain is no longer translating an approximation of the story. You read a book; your brain reads letters printed in ink on paper and transforms that into a world. You watch a movie; you’re seeing imagery inside of a rectangle while you’re sitting inside a room, and your brain translates that into a world. And you connect to this even though you know it’s not real, but because you’re in the habit of suspending disbelief.

With virtual reality, you’re essentially hacking the visual-audio system of your brain and feeding it a set of stimuli that’s close enough to the stimuli it expects that it sees it as truth. Instead of suspending your disbelief, you actually have to remind yourself not to believe.

-Chris Milk, from The Last Medium (the whole article is excellent)

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