In Search of Reality
What VR Gets Wrong — and What It Could Get Right
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We've been building alternate realities for as long as we've been human. The technology changes. The impulse doesn't.
That's the insight I keep returning to every time I hear someone describe virtual reality as a novelty, or worse, as a passing trend. Designing virtual worlds is not new. It is, in fact, one of the oldest human drives — to construct worlds beyond the one we were born into, to inhabit different stories, to see through different eyes.
But here's the problem: most VR experiences today are doing something far too modest. They're putting us somewhere else. They're not making us someone else.
The Physics Problem
In 1979, physicist Bernard d'Espagnat argued that the question of what is real is central to all other inquiries. It's a deceptively simple claim. We assume reality is the thing we can touch, measure, verify. But the entire history of modern philosophy — and physics — tells us otherwise.
Consider light. Human beings perceive light in one particular way. Other species perceive it entirely differently. There is no master version of reality adjudicating between them. There is only what different kinds of perceptual apparatus make available.
This is not a philosophical abstraction. It's a design brief.
One of the most compelling VR experiences I've encountered over the years which takes this problem seriously was In the Eyes of the Animal by Marshmallow Laser Feast. Rather than dropping you onto the summit of Everest or into a war zone, it places you inside the sensorial perspective of non-human species within a forest environment. The headset itself becomes organic. You don't just go somewhere. You become something else.
That is a fundamentally different proposition — and it points to what VR can be when it draws on physics rather than just spectacle, but there is still a problem of our cognitive limits.
The Cognition Problem
In 2007, Damien Hirst created a work called In Search of Reality — pill cabinets filled with fake pharmaceuticals, sitting inside a broader series asking: What is real? What do we believe? What are we searching for?
Hirst was working in an era of growing anxiety about pharmaceutical culture and the medicalisation of everyday life — a period I explored in my own book, The Medicalization of Cyberspace (co-authored with Dr Emma Rich, 2008). His question was whether science had become the new religion: a belief system promising relief, escape, and meaning in pill form.
The parallel with VR is sharp. Both offer the promise of escape. Both carry the risk of substitution — of replacing the messy texture of lived experience with a curated, frictionless alternative.
And both emerged at the dawn of a new media rupture: social media. The moment TIME magazine declared "You" person of the year in 2006, we entered an information ecosystem designed to colonise our attention. As media scholar Jeffrey Sconce has argued, our fear of the War of the Worlds broadcast — the famous 1938 "panic" that largely never happened — was never really about Martians. It was about media invading and reshaping our consciousness.
That anxiety hasn't gone away. It has intensified. And it is the cultural backdrop against which VR must now make its case.
The Story Problem
The deepest opportunity in VR is not immersion. It is inhabitation.
There is a meaningful difference between being placed in a new environment and being invited to live a different story. Great literature doesn't transport you to another location. It lets you inhabit another consciousness. Great film doesn't just show you a world — it makes you feel what it is to want, fear, and lose as another person.
That is the standard VR should be held to.
This means designing for role adoption, not just perspective. It means helping users understand that they are not simply themselves in a different place — they are, for the duration of the experience, someone else entirely. That shift — from spectator to inhabitant — is where VR becomes genuinely transformative.
As trivial as this comparison might seem, one of the great examples from the last decade to really get this was Pokémon Go. This hugely popular game for kids offered a glimpse of this capability and appeal. It didn't just overlay digital content onto physical space. It gave millions of people a reason to move through their cities differently, to notice things they had stopped seeing, to share a collective fiction. It was not high art. But it understood something important: the most powerful alternate realities are the ones that change how we relate to this reality.
What VR Designers Should Take Away
Three principles, drawn from this longer history:
1. Expand the sensorial palette. Don't just relocate the user. Reconfigure their perceptual experience. Bring physicists into early design conversations. Ask what reality could feel like, not just look like.
2. Design for inhabitation, not observation. The goal is not to give users a view from somewhere new. It is to give them a life — however brief — that is genuinely different from their own.
3. Resist the replication trap. The most common failure in VR is the attempt to perfectly recreate physical reality in digital form. That is both impossible and unambitious. The power of VR lies in its capacity to offer experiences that physical reality cannot — not cheaper versions of experiences it already provides.
We are not the first generation to long for alternate realities. We are simply the first with this particular set of tools.
The question is not whether VR is here to stay. It is. The question is whether we will use it to replicate the world we already have — or to reveal worlds we haven't yet imagined
