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How IRL Love Can Survive in the Age of VR

What happens when “long distance” means going digital?
Screencap via VICE's The Digital Love Industry

Gender Swap - Experiment with The Machine to Be Another from BeAnotherLab on Vimeo.

Back in 2013, when Spike Jonze released the movie Her, the concept of a virtual relationship felt both otherworldly and hauntingly close. Three years later, we’re exponentially closer to Spike Jonze’s imagined future. Virtual reality now spans mediums as a gaming format, a storytelling device, and an artistic endeavor, amongst many other things. Creatives are flocking to the medium as the new frontier, and in 2014, Google released Google Cardboard, a VR device that costs as little as $2, making VR technology boundlessly accessible.

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Since VR has hit the mainstream, Jonze’s apprehension about artificial interaction is resurfacing. Stanford University has an ongoing Virtual Human Interaction Lab dedicated to both researching VR’s practical potential while also grappling with “what new social issues arise from the use of immersive VR communication systems." One specific area of their VR research involves the transfer of intimacy through such devices. Amongst the mechanisms cited, though it might seem like a sad joke, is the Hug Over A Distance device, which links couples through two vests and allows you to send a “hug” to your partner.

One level beyond Hug Over A Distance is a “human to human tele-kiss” machine called the Kissenger: a vaguely pig-shaped robot interface that tracks your lip movements so that you can literally kiss bae thru the phone. Obviously, the ultimate next step in your cyber-relationship is all of the ways to have cyber sex in real time. Even on top of that is the true VR porn, charmingly called “teledildonics” that can put you right in the middle of a virtual orgy. And that’s just the beginning of this burgeoning industry.

Watch: VICE investigates the Digital Love Industry:

These devices feel silly and unnecessary at first blush. However, according to an AARP poll taken in 2010, feelings of loneliness amongst adults has doubled since 1980. One of the biggest questions now in Stanford’s VHIL Lab is whether these simulated interactions can satisfy a human’s desire for intimacy as much as, say, a real life hug could. Stanford professor Jeremy Bailenson tells The Creators Project, “For almost 20 years we have been running studies to see which cues are most important (i.e., eye gaze, personal space, etc.) and building systems that replicate those cues in networked VR.” He continues, “We have shown that heartbeats displayed on avatars are experienced as intimate cues. Because heartbeat communication is an intimate experience, it could potentially help establish and maintain closer connections between individuals.”

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That’s how the research plays out, but there is still reasonable apprehension towards using VR in such a pragmatic way. This industry of mimicking intimacy isn’t focused on connecting us to each other, but rather on isolating us within our own virtual world. Even if these products can satisfy the need for corporeal intimacy, it still leaves us alone when there isn’t flesh and blood on the other end of a receiver.

What are your predictions for the future of love in the digital age? Let us know @CreatorsProject or in the comments below.

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