BARCELONA—The future's made of virtual insanity. Sure, some of us have known this since the '90s. But Mark Zuckerberg all but declared 2016 to be the Year of VR in a surprise appearance on stage at Samsung's press conference here at Mobile World Congress, making it clear: VR will not be a flash in the pan like 3D.
If there's one big trend this year at MWC so far, it's VR. Samsung and LG now have dueling VR cameras: Samsung's is much higher resolution (at 30 megapixels) but LG's will probably be cheaper, maybe even bundled with a phone. HTC has a new version of its Vive room-filling VR unit, and an early adopter $799 price. At ZTE's press conference, it didn't announce a VR headset but made sure to sing their praises.
And VR grabs you by the gut, sometimes literally. At CES, I sampled VR porn, which starts fooling your brain into thinking things are happening in parts of your body that aren't covered by a VR set. (Yet.) Here at MWC, our Ajay Kumar hopped on Samsung's Gear VR rollercoaster, which is much more family-friendly, but equally intense—and equally displacing you from the space you're actually in.
Zuckerberg made a good pitch for virtual space, always tying it to real space. He's Facebook, after all, and Facebook, ultimately, is families.
"Pretty soon we're going to live in a world where everyone has the power to share and experience whole scenes...I think of my baby daughter, and I want to remember how she takes her first steps," he said. "I want to capture the whole scene...even if my parents and family aren't there, they can feel like they are."
Virtual reality will let friends always gather around the campfire, he said, or colleagues host business meetings between scattered partners anywhere on Earth.
"One day you're going to be able to put on a headset that will change the way you live, work and communicate," he said. "VR is going to be the most social platform."
Zuckerberg said Facebook has been "working to make Facebook the best platform for 360 videos," with more than 1 million people watching 360s every day on Facebook. The company has developed algorithms that can boost resolution by four times while cutting bandwidth usage to a quarter, by transmitting data about the area you're looking at rather than other parts of the scene.
And Facebook's not alone. Where Facebook, through Oculus, has aligned with Samsung, LG kept promoting its Google connections, talking up Google Street View and 360 videos on YouTube.
Useless, Twisting, All Our New Technology
But there's something much scarier about virtual reality than about even our smartphone-centric lifestyles.
Ultimately, we are still animals existing in physical space. Wireless Internet access has offloaded parts of our brains into the cloud. Maybe we don't always pay attention to the world around us when we're looking at our phones, but at least it can still impinge in from the edges. That's good and right, because we are animals and not code.
But VR takes us dangerously closer to being disembodied, which is a problem because we aren't. Sitting in the Samsung keynote, there was a point at which we were all a room of people in headsets sitting right next to each other, but infinitely far apart, each in our own virtual space. We were completely unaware of the things near us that could affect our physical bodies, which we still inhabited. (I just saw a photo of Mark Zuckerberg walking right past a bank of people wearing headsets; none of them noticed.)
This could just be because I'm an old now, nostalgic for the ASCII-art Internet of my youth. But I don't want to be entirely detached from where my body is in reality. Can we sip from the fount of VR without losing ourselves entirely? We may have just a few years to figure this out.
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.