The Oculus Quest 2 Is No Escape From the Hell of 2020
Virtual reality promises something it cannot deliver
I feel a little dizzy. It’s 11:52 a.m., and I’m in VR Chat talking to a stranger who tells me he’s “just hopping worlds.” A crude virtual campsite surrounds us — polygonal blue shrooms, some seven-feet tall, glowing in the synthetic dusk — and I lift my little plastic controllers to make my avatar shrug.
“It’s the first time I’ve done this,” I say. My real voice is recorded by the headset and transmitted through a giant, smiling stick of butter — the skin I’ve selected for myself in this virtual world. Given the opportunity to be an adonis, I chose a pile of fat that fell out of a cow.
“Eh, it’s okay: If you get a few people to talk, it’ll be entertaining,” the stranger responds. We can’t, though. A few people are hanging out, but it’s crickets at the campsite. The stranger sounds bored, I’m bored, and someone representing themselves as a disco ball with beefy gorilla arms is running back and forth and staring at us. It’s time for me to leave.
VR is the ultimate novelty, and those of us observing lockdowns are starved for that.
I peel my headset off and hop into a different kind of virtual reality: my 12 p.m…
