Skip to content

Faszination Virtual Reality: What comes after the Wow Effect

There is hardly any other media experience that impresses and seduces as much as Virtual Reality the first time. But what about later use?

Every VR enthusiast should remember the moment when he or she put on modern VR glasses for the first time. For me it was a HTC Vive and Space Pirate trainer. I felt like the seven-year-old boy holding a Gameboy for the first time. Suddenly everything seemed possible again.

Of course, the initial fascination didn’t stay in shape. How could she do that? At that time, my brain had to classify what it had seen and revise its own concept of reality. I still remember how the so-called reality seemed unreal to me after the first virtual reality trip – as if I still had the VR glasses on. A well-known and somewhat eerie phenomenon.

This kind of recalibration happens the first time and maybe the second time. After that the perception has normalized and everything is going as usual.

What comes after the wow effect?

Since this first time I have spent hundreds of hours in Virtual Reality, testing countless apps, watching VR porn of all categories and genres. My brain, it seems, has known for a long time what to expect when I wear VR glasses. So I shouldn’t be surprised by anything – but I do. Because in virtual reality I still often get the feeling that I am in a different place and that I enjoy this illusion.

This is not the case for everyone: For newcomers who are not enthusiastic about technology right from the start, the enthusiasm flattens out quickly: after the first wow effect, most people no longer feel like strapping a computer to their face. “If I’ve seen it, it’s good,” they usually say. And ours shakes our heads in a shocked way.

A long-lasting fascination

  • Where did you get this shock? VR veterans have lost their initial infatuation after three or more years. However, it has given way to the continuing fascination of getting to know the other person better.
  • In the case of virtual reality, this counterpart is not a human being, but an art form. For both, however, the same applies: the more one deals with the opposite, the more fascinating it becomes.
  • Just as an art connoisseur in a museum enjoys forms, colors and textures, so do we enjoy all the nuances that Virtual Reality offers and therefore like to look into this somewhat clumsy but magical peep-box again and again.

And he’s happy that it’s basically so primitive. Because the technology will never make such big steps again in such a short time as in the next years. Since the resurgence of Virtual Reality, I feel like I’m back in my childhood and back when the first 3D accelerators appeared and the game universes became noticeably more beautiful and bigger every year. It was as if a new world was opening up. Also in this technical sense the fascination for Virtual Reality should last for a long time.