Experience On Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do

Reading this after Infinite Reality is interesting since it shows how much has changed in just a few years. The book is great in that it goes through a gold mine of great use cases with all the evidence to support why these use cases are valid. Even though I’ve worked in the lab personally, there’s so much that I wasn’t aware of until I read into its history told by Jeremy. The book focuses on the hype-resistant, time-tested tenets of what conditions call for virtual reality that I would recommend this book to both veterans or beginners of the field. The book does have some overlap with Infinite Reality, but the main difference is that Infinite Reality focuses more on the idea of the virtual whereas Experience On Demand focuses more on our modern day, colloquial concept of virtual reality.

The most important thing I got from the book was that there are a few great use cases and a lot of bad use cases of VR. I’ve become somewhat jaded by all the bad VR floating around, that it’s hard to see that these are merely collateral results of the hype which first began with the good use cases. Some of these good cases are procedural training, psychological treatments, fantastical games and movies, to name a few. I’ve maintained that VR was never and will never be the ultimate medium, just like how smartphones never quite replaced the computer, but it does do a few things extremely well, surpassing other media by a wide margin in the results that it gets. I feel much more effort and investment should be placed into these few areas where the technology is useful instead of just cool or new, and I’m taking this idea to heart in my future projects as well.