Aerobanquets RMX uses VR to provide new food experiences. Their work is aiming to use tools of the technocracy to try to understand food. By redesigning food experiences, they offer a completely different experience. They pursue food as an art, not something that must be done to live.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/dining/virtual-reality-food-aerobanquets-rmx.html
This article gave me an opportunity to re-think about what VR is. I summarize my current thought from here.
Technology that breaks our perceptual experience
It is often said that humans heavily rely on visual perception. When the information from vision changes, it may overturn what we have learned throughout our lives. Simply speaking, when a person, for example, eats a tomato which is displayed as a beautiful planet in VR, does she still percept the food as a tomato or percept as something completely new? Or a person who hates to eat a mushroom from childhood and haven’t eaten something looks like a mushroom from the time might be able to eat it through the VR world and find it is actually very tasty.
Also, in the real world, visual information and an object exist there correspond one-to-one. When an object corresponds to multiple visions in VR world, what do we recognize as the truth?
Technology that manipulates humans
Through creating a different world, VR control how people percept the world. As I wrote in the last section, humans depend on visual perception a lot. Thus, manipulating that perception means that that technology can control humans at a significant rate. If we use it in a good manner, for example, we could eliminate trauma of people. However, if we use it in the opposite way, it could cause trauma.
By the way, how much connection can people have between the real world and the VR world? If it’s very strong, it is very important to control morals in VR content creation so that we can avoid that various VR contents negatively affect humans’ lives.
Technology that designs a new world
After all, this is the main point of VR. For that, it is necessary to doubt what we think as common sense. I’m interested in promoting human learning, but what does learning mean? What is the core of it? What kind of experience is required for it?