I’ve been interested in the prospect of virtual reality for some time now, but only recently have I been able to actually experience it for myself. The first opportunity I had to try it out was at one of the stores on the ground floor of the new tech shopping mall next to the Guanghua electronics market. They had an Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 rig set up there, where one could experience a roller coaster ride as well as a solar system demo. As it was my first experience with VR, it was bound to be impressive. I gripped the stool with one hand and tried to right myself as well as I could while the roller coaster tossed and turned, climbed and dove. I could look around, which was novel. I’ve always been interested in the little corners of video game environments that nobody else paid any attention to, and VR provides the potential for people like me to explore those corners better than any previous system has been able to so far. I like the exploring part of these environments far better than the shooting part. I’d turn on the god mode of FPS games just so I wouldn’t be distracted by all the killing and playovers, letting me just walk around and look at things. That was one of the main reasons I preferred PC gaming to console units back in the day.

The solar system demo was also impressive, sitting in a little cart jetting around based on eye movements, but somehow too abstract to convey the real experience. I found myself thinking, if I could just see some more detail in these massive things, I’d have a better idea of their size.

But what the Oculus DK2 set provided was just a glimpse of what VR could offer. The main feature was the low latency; at no point did I feel sick or dizzy, though I’d think providing chairs with actual backs wouldn’t be a bad idea for people trying out VR for the first time. What it didn’t provide, what it was sorely lacking in fact, was sufficient resolution to really make the view believe that they are seeing these things for real. Also, it felt limiting to be constricted to sitting in one spot and be led around by the program. It’s not the way we operate in reality, so it feels somewhat at odds with the concept of virtual reality. There’s movement, but you don’t feel it with your body; there’s no inertia to be overcome, no real sense of the movement involved. Also (and this is not an inherent fault of the Oculus), after being tried by so many people, the DK2 headset was kind of ratty and smudged. It felt very much like wearing dirty goggles.

My next opportunity with this technology came at a recent Taipei tech show, where I was able to try out HTC’s Vive setup. This meant waiting in line for a period of time before being ushered into a black room with a solitary chair. I put on the headset and found myself in a large white space. The controllers on the virtual floor matched their actual position at my feet so exactly that bending over and picking them up was completely natural. “Ok, we’re going to start the first demo,” the HTC people told me through the headset’s speaker.

And immediately I was on the deck of a sunken ship. Yeah, I’ve read about this demo, but it really can’t be described. The Youtube videos of it don’t come close to matching the experience. It’s really…almost…like you’re there. Unlike with the Oculus, I could walk around, to a limited extent. I walked over to peer over the side of the ship, down to the bottom, and the handlers said, “Be careful, you’re about to run into a wall.” The detail was far better than that of the Oculus DK2, as was the field of view.

This! I thought. This, I’ve got to have. But maybe not; in the first quarter of 2016, not only will the Vive arrive on shelves, but the new Oculus, which has better resolution, etc. as well as Sony’s Morpheus, which plays with an updated version of the PS4 called the Playstation VR, and Samsung’s Gear VR, which can be used with your phone (Your phone, not mine. I’m still using an old iPhone 4, which is pathetically unable to handle such things).

I don’t have a powerful PC set up, but I have been thinking of getting a console, so it might be that the Morpheus and a PS4 would work better for me. If the Vive plays well with my iMac, I might go that way. If the Oculus lets me move around, maybe that. Who knows? Nobody knows, at least for the moment; it’s a free-for-all, and it might not go anywhere if the developers don’t over the problem of integrating physical motion in games. Many, if not most of the proposed game demos feel like ordinary games forced into a VR medium, and don’t really take advantage of anything VR has to offer. Who wants to be in a cart the whole time? I’ve seen rigs with a guy standing on a movable plate and harnessed into a ring around their waists, but that seems half-assed to me. What would be better? I  have no idea, but I have to admit the idea of making my living room into a VR space just for games, where I am free to move about in a roughly five-square-meter area, appeals to me. The games would have to be specially designed to fit these limitations, though. How would that work? Would all of the rooms be of that size or smaller? Would you have to turn around at each door? Will longer distances necessarily be done on little hoverboards, etc.? Could a special chair be made to simulate motions in the game? Shouldn’t the controllers be more like gloves and have force feedback inside? For now, it seems they’ve got the head motion tracking part down, including binaural audio feeds. Improvements from here on out will be in resolution and field of view, as well as the mechanics of physical motion in the games.

How well will MMORPGs work with VR? Who wouldn’t love to simply wander about the Enterprise, or Mos Eisley spaceport, or the bath house from Spirited Away, or Hogwarts? Even if there were nobody to fight, no challenges or anything, just spending time in those worlds would be fascinating.

Interesting times lie ahead. But I can’t help but wonder how much of their lives people will invest in these environments. Surely within a few short years they will become perceptibly indistinguishable from reality, and if we can choose to inhabit crafted worlds, what happens to our ability to deal with the actual physical world? What happens if the populations of more affluent nations are mostly immersed in these worlds, while everyone else has to deal with reality? What happens if there’s a point where everyone is in these worlds, and not in this one? Will it be mandatory? Will reality become unpopular, or even illegal to experience, or both? Will there be a backlash? If so, will anyone care? I suspect we’re going to find out.

Yesterday afternoon I met up with Chenbl and his fellow floutists at the Danshui MRT. We’ve done a couple of shows in the past with them on flute and me on trumpet; somehow word got out, and a retirement community out there invited us to play for their residents. One of their people met us at the station and took us up the hillside, past Tamkang University, to the hillside establishment. The lobby was a mixture of hotel and hospital, flanked by an atrium with large windows facing the ocean and the setting sun.

We got ready and warmed up in the place’s library, and I sat next to the side door of the small stage while the other groups played old Mandarin and Minnan favorites to the large group of elderly people, many in wheelchairs, caregivers feeding them small pieces of cake by hand. The retirees hummed and even sang along to the old songs; it was actually kind of touching.

Though our performance went well, musically speaking, the people handling the technical part of the event weren’t quite with the program, cutting off “Rose Rose I love You” halfway through the song. Then the MC said “And next is ‘Summertime’, a song frequently played at funerals!” Chenbl and I both stared in horror as he said this, but the MC seemed to think it was perfectly ok, so we shrugged and kept playing. Hopefully our rendition of the song managed to avoid any kind of funereal intimations.

After the show, the audience trickled out slowly, back to their games of chess and mahjong in the building’s atrium. A couple of them told me they really enjoyed the show, which was nice. We took a bus back down the hill, and a long subway ride back to the city.

On one of the photo walks I do as part of my class, I recently took my students to the Nanjichang Community, which is slated for demolition so that developers can put up even more useless, soulless empty high-rises. The chief of the community took us around to the various interesting bits of the community, which was the first of its kind in Taipei. It was built on the former site of the south airport used by the Japanese, thus the name Nanjichang, which means “south airport”, and includes rows of multi-storied buildings containing tiny apartments connected by central spiral staircases that never caught on in subsequent designs. Over the years, residents have built out and up, so that once-wide lanes are now narrow alleys. Some of the added balconies themselves have added balconies, and it’s a miracle that one of them hasn’t collapsed by now. There is also a market, a compact elementary school, a surprising number of cats and an unsurprising number of smells. The whole place is a fascinating mix, the residents mostly poor people, the elderly, the handicapped, Southeast Asians, caregivers and orphans. The community chief wants to highlight the existence of the place, even though he is powerless to stop the demolition. I’m thinking of doing another photo walk there with my friend and fellow photographer Craig Ferguson. There are plenty of spaces around that could be used for a small exhibition. Who knows, we might be able to play a part in somehow preserving the history of the place or even helping the people who live there, people whom I doubt will be compensated very well when the place is torn down.

One of the buildings in the community, a triangular building with a courtyard in the center, strictly prohibits random people entering and photographing the place. The reason is that they charge for such things, and actually make a tidy profit from various photography, TV and movie shoots. The community chief took us in and let everyone wander for a period of time. Chenbl and I stayed in the courtyard chatting with the community chief, and at one point one of the residents came storming up to him, cursing up a storm. “One of those photographers came into my home and took my picture!” He spat in Taiwanese. I found this surprising and unlikely as I’ve always told my students that respect for the people they photograph is of the utmost importance.

The community chief was also suspicious, and he volleyed back with his own, even more impressive string of Taiwanese expletives, expressing doubt over the man’s story, and asking for proof. “Which one was it?” he demanded. But the man couldn’t point anyone out or say anything specific. Chenbl and I stood in between the two, listening in frank admiration to these two men shout and gesture at each other.

“Fucking renter,” the chief muttered after the man left, unable to prove his claims of injustice. “He doesn’t even own that place.” Eventually I was able to ascertain that a student had taken a picture of the hallway outside of his apartment, not even shooting the guy himself, and he had construed this as “barging into his home.”

Something tells me that that particular building will be one of the less-missed parts of the community when it’s gone.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been teaching a photography course at the Zhongzheng Community College, and although it’s been a good deal of work, it’s also been interesting. I’ve learned a lot in the process, not just about photography but about myself, and some of it’s been kind of, well, stupid.

I’ll illustrate this with a story: I often tell my students not to get too upset when they miss a shot, because in my experience you miss even more shots while you’re busy being upset about missing the original shot. Still, I can’t help but rile myself up when it happens to me. Recently I was on my way to my favorite photobook shop, Artland on Renai Road across from the old Air Force base, when I noticed some nice light and patterns on the Lotus Building. I walked around the back and saw a wonderful composition of a woman on a smoke break with her hand just so among the lines of the building amid the plants. Just as my finger pressed the shutter, however, she moved and it because a rather ordinary shot. Then she went inside, the light disappeared, and I was left in a heavy funk I had no right to be in.

Usually the gods will taunt me in these circumstances by with a series of other tasty opportunities to miss, but this time I needed a Proper Lesson, it seems; just as I was stewing over the lost shot, heading down the stairs into the basement where the bookstore is located, I took a wrong step and began the seemingly interminable process of falling down the concrete stairs. Anyone who has fallen down stairs can tell you that it just…goes…on…and…on. Eddie Murphy’s entire comedic bit on the process (“my shoe!”) went through my mind as I waited for myself to come to rest. At one point I felt and heard my camera strike the concrete with a loud THUNK, and I thought, well, that makes sense; it’s just out of the two-year warranty.

I ended up sprawled in a leisurely fashion on a group of potted plants at the bottom of the stairs. I could feel what I hoped was wet sod from one of the overturned pots under me. I ached in various places, but unlike the case of my friend and fellow BMEr Justin Vogel’s recent mishap, nothing seemed broken, and I took a shot with my camera to make sure it stilled worked. A fashionably dressed woman hurried down the stairs, glanced at me, and kept going. “Thanks for the help!” I offered her retreating figure. I must have looked like a drunk, homeless person who has just woken up with no idea where he is. But this, I realized, was what you get when you stew over missing a shot. It’s stupid and a waste of time, and if you get too upset, some wandering spirit will toss your ass down some stairs into a photobook shop doorway just to knock some sense into you.