This is Virtual Reality (Ecotrain)

I tried on this VR headset yesterday. Never had a look before into that kind of thing.
My teenage son got hold of it somehow. He's famous on Instagram and people send him all kinds of things, hoping that some of his fame might rub off on them somehow.

I put the headset over my eyes and suddenly I was in a dark room. I had a look around. There was a chair by a table, a couple of pictures on the wall. Things moving around in the corner and scuttling along the floor. It was supposed to be some kind of haunted house, I guess. Not very realistic and not all that scary, but kind of engrossing. A little bit tense because you were always expecting the door to burst open and something to jump out at you. But it didn't. Nothing happened. Still, I sat there, looking around. Trying to focus on the pictures on the wall, but they were unclear, pixellated.

I really don't know how long I was there in that room. My youngest son was tugging at my sleeve demanding that he be allowed to look. I told him 'no. it's weird. It's too scary for you. Anyway, I'm looking at it now, wait a minute, we'll find something else less spooky.' Eventually, somewhat reluctantly - because there was something in a way quite soothing about looking around this other place - strange and unreal though it was - that made me want to stay there and not come out - I took off the headset...

...and my mind jolted - as if I'd been suddenly hit with some powerful psychoactive substance - as my eyes refocused on the world around me. I'd forgotten where I was. Completely forgotten. I was so surprised to find myself in this familiar room - at home with my two boys, in a reality I remembered as if from a dream (though I had only been away for a few minutes, and hadn't actually been anywhere at all) that I fell into a state of shock.

I knew at once that this device was more powerful and more mind altering than any development in Virtual Reality so far to hit the mainstream of society. I knew it in the shock of that moment of switching from one reality to another, in the same way that when I first saw the internet, about twenty five years ago, I got the same feeling - exhilaration mixed with dread - of what this could mean. Of where it could lead.

Let's be realistic. This is virtual reality. Where we are now. On Steemit, on Facebook, on Satellite navigation, on internet banking, on instant messaging. We are operating in a world that does not exist in physical reality, except in the form of electrons flowing though a wire (or more often these days, photons bouncing through a fiber-optic tube) and little lights flickering on a screen in front of our eyes. It transports us here and there almost instantaneously. We can be anywhere in that world at any time, or lots of places at the same time - skip from one reality to the next, and skip out when we want to, back to this one.

What am I saying? Is this a bad thing? Is this a good thing? Well, it could be either. Most likely it's both. The fact is, this is reality. We are already in it. The question is where is it going to take us? Where are we going to take it? Are we ready for the next stage? We've already got our smartphones, our wireless internet connection. Our networks are in place. The only question is, is this what we want? For ourselves? For our children?

I had this memory come up on facebook yesterday. It's a good thing facebook is there to remind me of my memories, because mine is shot to pieces. It was a photo of my children when they were a few years smaller, playing in the garden. One of them climbing a tree, the other inside a big cardboard box with 'Handle with Care' written on in.

The caption I had written for the photo read:

'You can say what you like about modern technology, but you can't beat a big cardboard box for hours of fun.'

I wonder if that's true. I kind of suspect that it is.