Immersive Illness?

"A challenge that concerns me the most is lurking on the horizon, one we don't yet understand the full scope of. As Immersive Education and other forms of personal virtual reality become more realistic and compelling we're going to see "immersive illness" become more common and more difficult to deal with. Although this is an issue today we're somewhat protected by the limitations of today's personal computers and game consoles (they just aren't powerful enough...yet), but in another decade or more it'll be a different story altogether. Nobody knows exactly what impact insanely realistic, media-rich virtual reality will have on society. We're already dealing with early forms of immersive illness, such as addiction, alienation, mental schisms, and more, but today it's not a problem that affects a large percentage of users. We don't see massive problems today for a number of reasons, including rather low-quality virtual environments and limitations on how much time we spend in these environments. But what happens when the visual and audio quality becomes indistinguishable from reality, the technology becomes truly mainstream, and a substantial portion of education takes place in such environments and not in a real classroom? With massive power comes massive problems. Last week I was asked how big this problem will be, and I responded that nobody knows for sure but I'd estimate that the at-risk population can be calculate by adding the percentage of people with addiction problems to the percentage of society that suffer some form of mental illness. That's a big chunk of society. Is it all gloom and doom? Certainly not, but it's a grand challenge we're not even remotely prepared for today. As with other disruptions society will eventually adapt, but I think we're in for a very rough ride." - Professor Aaron Walsh

Full interview available at http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/05/teaching_in_vr_.html

The notion of "immersive illness" is relatively a newly developed term. In one of the articles that we were just told to read, Professor Walsh coins the term "immersive illness" as the following: "the growing problem of addiction to virtual reality." Can we actually become addicted to the non-real, virtual reality? To critically analyze this question, I believe we have to tackle the issue of general addictions that are prevalent among the society.

Does this condition of "immersive illness" have a possibility of becoming more common than now? Professor Walsh in the article notes that early forms of immersive illness are already present in the current era. These early forms of "immersive illness" are namely addiction, alienation, mental schisms and more. Although these issues only pertain to a small group of people, it definitely has the possibility to become more prevalent. As Google Cardboard, Oculus VR, MS HoloLens and many other virtual reality devices and modules grow popularity among the general public, people will depend more heavily on the information and other privileges offered by these VR headsets and devices. We currently can observe intensified degree of cellphone addiction, when smartphones took over the regular 2G cellphones. This immersive illness is definitely a possibility among the users in the future generation when virtual reality is widely adapted to replace real life, physical interactions and many experiences. For example, when classes are perfectly replaced by immersive learning environment, some students will certainly suffer a form of immersive illness due to lack of human interactions and many other reasons.

I believe the future of immersive experience depends on the VR technology developers' efforts to create a clear line between the real world and virtual reality, and thus immersive environment. If people lose the ability to distinguish the two environment, there will be a higher chance among people to obtain the immersive illness. People should acknowledge the values and importance of real life environment, while enjoying the comforts that come from immersive environment.