Arthem.co

i put “All I Want for Christmas is You” through a MIDI converter, and then back through an mp3 converter

Photo of UNICEF VR experience, Brighton Station, UK, September 2016, by Justin Pickard.

Following quotation from the founder of VR company Oculus:

Shortly after Facebook announced the acquisition of the virtual reality company Oculus VR for 2 billion dollars, the firm’s very young founder appeared onstage at a Silicon Valley VR conference. Someone in the audience asked Palmer Luckey a rather odd but revealing question: Why did he and his chief technology officer, video game pioneer John Carmack, often speak of a “moral imperative” to bring virtual reality to the masses?

“This is one of those crazy man topics,” Luckey answered, “but it comes down to this: Everyone wants to have a happy life, but it’s going to be impossible to give everyone everything they want.“ Instead, he went on, developers can now create virtual versions of real experiences that are only enjoyed by the planet’s privileged few, which they can then bestow to the destitute of the world.

“It’s easy for us to say, living in the great state of California, that VR is not as good as the real world,” Luckey went on, “but a lot of people in the world don’t have as good an experience in real life as we do here.”

In fact, as Luckey suggests to me in a follow-up conversation, it may be people from developing nations who’ll be among the first to embrace virtual reality. While the technology must become extremely compelling to attract well-off Californians away from their enviable real lives, he argues, “[i]f you’re talking about Chinese workers or people who are living in Africa, I think the threshold is a lot lower… it could be a lot of the early adopters are the people who have a greater incentive to escape the real world.”