Infinite Reality: The Hidden Blueprint of Our Virtual Lives

The book is interestingly positioned right before the Oculus Rift’s launch and subsequent hype which gives it a relatively unadulterated view of the field. It goes through a lot of history of the related studies, and although I’ve personally encountered many of them in my studies, they’re still great refreshers on the psychology behind VR. The book outlines many great uses of VR, and these are real, legitimate cases unlike the “VR for blockchain-simulated Antarctic penguins that migrate using deep learning” you see floating around today. They’re grounded in specific, albeit many times limited use case areas. I would recommend this book as an exposition into the psychology side of virtual reality, and virtual information in general. Keep in mind the dated nature of the book since Bailenson’s new book is likely more applicable to current state of the art, but there’s much to learn from Infinite Reality as well.

The most important takeaway from the book was that virtual reality doesn’t depend on any specific medium of execution, like an HMD or a phone. The book’s rather loose definition of VR fits much better to the vision of the virtual as presenting an input-output system of information ungrounded on physical reality. That can be tracking the user’s body movements and then displaying corresponding images in an HMD, or just as valid reading a novel and imagining the story within one’s mind. Taking this mindset has a great slew of benefits as it detaches the core idea from the technological arms race (which is important on its own but shouldn’t be confused with advancing the general VR field), and instead allow us to analyze the information input-output for how it should or could be used.