The Development of the Technology of the Future

VR could one day replace the need for paper and sketch models and take us into a world of virtual creativeness. However, many objects and practices that we are currently surrounded by and encounter have come from a vision from the past, much like virtual reality but, if VR has been around for so long then why are you not reading this paper on a virtual rolling screen? Why isn’t VR being so widely used? Have we become so narrow minded that passion for the new has vanished? Perhaps for us to understand this we need to consider previous studies on Virtual Reality. Many of these studies have been found in The Journal of the Virtual Reality Society which dates back to 1995 however, perhaps an echoing sign that narrow mindedness has taken over, the facility where they were stored only had volumes up to 2012. Nevertheless, the volumes available had 3 significant studies that strangely related back to a current issue that the design world faces today, collaboration.

Recently, there has been a movie trailer released by Steven Spielberg named Ready Player One (Movieclips Trailers 2017). Set in the year 2045, it talks of a world, again a world of over population, with a generation called missing millions. A generation that is portrayed to have nowhere else to go but the virtual world called the Oasis. Oasis seems to be a virtual world that is powered by nothing other than the imagination of the person in the virtual world. For someone with imagination it is easy to think of a world of beautiful green cities with no war and peace yet, with someone with perhaps a darker imagination, a corrupt world of anger war and danger. Both equally fine in a virtual world because you are living in the real world, but many could argue that the virtual world could become so real that your “real” life isn’t worth getting out of bed for but hopefully, it will never come to that. For anyone reading this it may be hard to appreciate that this has anything to do with creatives or the use of virtual reality in a creative space but more to do with the future we spoke about at the beginning. Appreciate it or not, the film is set in 2045 yet one could argue that this film is set 27 years too late. In fact, virtual reality has been around and experimented with for much longer than what many people wish to think and whilst stereotypically virtually reality is just another tool for video gamers it was in fact Ivan Sutherland (Virtual Reality Society, 2017) who created the “Ultimate Display” in 1965 which gave us the foundations for the present version of virtual reality. Today we see computer scientist’s, game designers and product designers collaborating to create an object that allows everyone to enjoy the once sci-fi predicted vision. But is it fair to say that one day all designers and object makers may be using virtual reality in their practice as a differing means to pen and paper, hands and clay, needle and thread?

Upon reading that word you may begin to think of lots of possibilities that may happen maybe five, ten or twenty years from now. Many designers and authors have dedicated their work to such word yet, in the year 2018 we are still waiting for the imagination of these to come to life to a certain extent. But, if we lose the ideologies of flying cars and over populated worlds and take a closer look at what is happening today, we can start to make educated assumptions on what the future may hold and maybe more importantly the future of creatives – or future creatives. Imagining that this ‘paper’ will one day be printed into a paperless world is a wonderful thought, but of course in the year 2018 the imagination and narrow mindedness of a minority soon stops that thought from entering the atmos. So, with tradition and normality, this paper will be discussing the future uses of Virtual Reality in the lives of creatives using current and past visions of Virtual Reality.