Hi there Backchannelers. This is Sandra, and I’m a VR skeptic. Yet with the Olympics embracing virtual reality, it’s clear even to a slow adopter that we’ve reached a turning point. The time has come for us holdouts to find religion. So this week I borrowed a Samsung Gear VR — the only NBC-approved headset — loaded up the network’s app, and tapped into the beach volleyball feed.
There I am in Rio, hovering a few feet above the ground, just behind the courtside photographers. I fiddle with the focus dial and peer at the figures on the court, four of the most athletic women in the world. But I can’t really see them. They are so blurry that all I can say with confidence is boy, are they tall.
The Talls are lunging across the sand and hammering at the ball. They thwack blistering serves and high-five and hug. The Talls, I learn, are Russian and Brazilian. But I can’t see their faces. I can barely tell the color of their bikinis. I feel no human connection to these lanky superbeings.
The image quality is about what you’d get with your nose pressed up against an old CRT, a combination of low resolution and what’s known as the “screen door effect,” for the thin lines that appear between magnified pixels. It’s like I got the most amazing seats in Rio, and then someone draped mosquito netting over my face. (So much for avoiding the hassles of Zika-proofing.)
To get a better view of the players, I try walking a few paces to my left, but my Rio-based self remains fixed in place. So I twist around to gawk at the people in the stands. There they are! Audience. Confirmed. After watching some match highlights and wondering about the strange man staring intently at me (What do I look like to him — am I just a camera? How can I find a mirror in this weird world?), I flip back to the app’s main menu and pull up the gymnastics feed.
Immediately the potential for awesome VR becomes more apparent. The gymnasts are still blurry, but this time I’m plopped in the middle of an arena, in front of a giant floor mat, where a lithe young man performs eye-popping flips. I turn around just in time to see another athlete sprinting towards a vault, his body a fast-moving smudge. Farther away I catch a speck of a person twirling effortlessly on a pommel horse. I’m in the middle of the action, right where I belong. I control what event I watch, and it feels wildly empowering. I’m starting to think this VR trend might have legs, in spite of the image quality.
To give VR beach volleyball some of the pizzazz of VR gymnastics, I could, in theory, have been perched right by the volleyball net. But really what I craved was the ability to explore, and not be stuck in one spot. A truly transformative VR sports app might involve more data and more cameras, set up at different vantage points around an arena. A user would toggle between those views, and enjoy the illusion of hopping around in virtual space. I picture it behaving like a crude version of Google Streetview: you’d flit between the available angles, and feel largely satisfied with this partial replica of the natural world. An upgrade roughly like this seems essential to not feel trapped and bodiless, a floating mind in a VR prison.
Something grazes my foot. I remove the headset, look down, and discover I’ve ambled a good three yards across my living room and am standing inches from a wall, which happens to contain the mail slot. Some letters have just arrived and landed at my feet. I’d traveled alarmingly far while mentally locked away in Brazil.
The moment gives me pause. As much as I may wish to wander around the sandy courts in Rio, the app’s constraints might be a blessing in disguise. Next time, I’ll anchor myself on a couch before those hyper-athletic fuzzballs start leaping across my field of view.
Want to learn more about the future of virtual reality sports? Sports-and-tech journalist Mary Pilon offers a clear-eyed prognosis.
Zipcar co-founder Robin Chase argues that with self-driving cars, we can finally solve many of our biggest urban problems — if we’re proactive. If we wait, we’ll create a nightmare.
The telcos claim that the next generation of wireless, or 5G, is about to blow our socks off. It’s pure fiction, explains tech policy expert Susan Crawford.
