Imagining the virtual outdoors
I was thinking about how this kind of 'weather lockdown' may become more common with increasing climate instability. ..
This past weekend, freezing arctic air dipped down to cover New England & had me staying indoors two days in a row. I was thinking about how this kind of 'weather lockdown' may become more common with increasing climate instability. Days where extreme heat or extreme cold can make even a short walk outside uncomfortable.
I don't own a metaverse headset from the company formerly known as Facebook, and my favorite form of virtual travel is the kind I undertake with a good book. I'm also aware of the vast amounts of energy and data usage that the AI powering these virtual technologies will require (which I think is a major impediment to companies trying to scale this tech globally & still keep their environmental pledges). But, setting that aside for a moment, I was imagining a couple ways that a kind of virtual traveling by 'metaverse' could add real value.
If there was a way of replicating aspects of popular travel destinations, I could picture a tour guide giving tourists some back-story to objects in a historical city as if they were on vacation (instead of inside a video-game-like space). I could imagine this seeming believeable-ish in a more densely packed human landscape (like London or Hong Kong) rather than a natural setting with a scale like the Grand Canyon. As far as the beach vision I pictured in the image at the top of this post: perhaps in the coming years, there will be many summer days where this becomes a viable option for experiencing that beach vacation.
The other type of virtual travel experience I imagined would be for a different kind of audience: climate change skeptics who play down the threats it poses. I picture a room of politicians being asked to put on a headset and pick a time & place in the next hundred years to travel to. Then they would be transported to a suburban California street in 2041 where a wildfire has wiped out the houses that would have faced them; or maybe it's downtown Miami in 2060 and floodwaters are thigh-high. A kind of 'experiential education' travel tour...