post 12 Review Peter Rubin's "Future Presence"

When we are talking about VR technology, we tend to think that it is something hard-core, unaccessible, and even cold. However, the way Peter Rubin discuss VR technology, and how it can relate to human intimate relationship, influence my perception of it. I started to see is as a neutral medium, instead of a product of Cyborg culture, or an experiment from science lab. VR is actually closer to our life and our feelings, as a concept in the cultural studies realm, rather than an emerging technology.

It is true that VR is still emerging, though it has been introduced to the world 20 years ago, the idea of "presence" that Peter Rubin has often mentioned in his book, always exists in our social life. Personally, I like the Chapter 6, which discussed intimacy and anonymity, and how VR chat room provide an alternative space for strangers to unburden themselves and develop intimacy with others.

"A real-world relationship tends to accrue trust and intimacy slowly, people’s innermost selves coming out over time. Meanwhile, because anonymity breeds candor, digital relationships can skip those early steps, or even invert the process: you can know a person’s deepest fears and fantasies before you learn their mannerisms, or even how they sound when they laugh."

Rubin, Peter. Future Presence (pp. 136-137). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

More than online social, VR evokes more realistic feelings regardless of the authenticity of the objects, because we can feel the spatial relationship with those objects, and we are not see the objects as objects, but the projections of it. So does stranger, we do not interact with them as we usually do in grounded reality, but treated them as someone we imagine in our heads.

In general, I think this is thought-evoking book, which allows readers to notice more about the humanity side of VR technology, and by recognizing the drive and desire for VR, we can design and develop better VR applications.