A Quote by Thomas Dolby

I started looking at small companies that were running a sort of virtual reality cottage industry: I had imagined that I would just put on a helmet and be somewhere else - that's your dream of what it's going to be.
Virtual reality started for me in sort of an unusual place. It was the 1970s. I got into the field very young: I was seven years old. And the tool that I used to access virtual reality was the Evel Knievel stunt cycle.
By making marijuana illegal, the agricultural people can't grab hold of it like they did with corn and wheat. So those companies are scrambling around trying to get hold of it, but they can't, because it's a cottage industry, and it will always be a cottage industry. Because the minute the big companies try to make it their own, like they did with soybeans...like Monsanto, they put their own patent on seeds, and you can't do that with marijuana.
Back in the 1980s, when the internet was only available to a small number of pioneers, I was often confronted by people who feared that the strange technologies I was working on, like virtual reality, might unleash the demons of human nature. For instance, would people become addicted to virtual reality as if it were a drug? Would they become trapped in it, unable to escape back to the physical world where the rest of us live? Some of the questions were silly, and others were prescient.
You put on this set of goggles, and within seconds, your brain is convinced you're now in a different, virtual environment. You're somewhere else, and that somewhere else may be a video game, it may be in a real-time movie, a museum exhibit, or a medical surgical training app.
Usually, companies, when they approach other people to do VR, they're like, 'We're gonna offer a virtual reality experience' - to me, that usually means they're gonna put a bunch of 360° cameras in a room, film something, and wrap the video in a sphere so you can head-track and look around. To me, that's not virtual reality. That's 360° video.
One of my friends started a company in 1997, seven years before Facebook, called SocialNet. And they had all these ideas, and you could be, like, a cat, and I'd be a dog on the Internet, and we'd have this virtual reality, and we would just not be ourselves. That didn't work because reality always works better than any fake version of it.
The park achieved a kind of reality. Like these virtual reality games the children are playing with. I told them we were doing this 40 years ago! Disneyland is virtual reality.
Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of anger with a knapsack on her pack. She didn't like discomfort; even picnics were untidy and inconvenient: all those insects and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes. Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere.
I love the '60s and sort of wish all design had stopped in 1967. That would be my dream. They were really just nailing it - everyone looked great - but then it started getting a bit slippery after that.
Display companies, many of them that we've spoken to, are really excited about virtual reality because they're actually running out of innovation opportunities in other markets.
We had a thing there where you could turn in - it was some sort of recycling program - the bottle caps of RC Cola. You'd turn in 12 of them, and you'd get a ticket to see a movie. That's how I started going to the movies. Running around the neighborhood looking for bottle caps. We were like little scavengers.
I was interested in virtual reality for several years even before working at USC, it wasn't an interest that started there at all. In fact, when I started working at USC, I already had prototypes of the Rift that were very similar to the final design.
When we first started our internet company, 'China Pages', in 1995, and we were just making home pages for a lot of Chinese companies. We went to the big owners, the big companies, and they didn't want to do it. We go to state-owned companies, and they didn't want to do it. Only the small and medium companies really want to do it.
[Donald Trump] puts a miner's hat on.The media, some in it, were concerned - or hoping - that Trump would have helmet hair when he took the helmet off. They were hoping that he had so much hair spray on, that the miner's helmet he was wearing would leave an indentation in his hair. That was actually a subject in some of the stories I read. So the MacGuffin... There's no media. There isn't any news.
You have a dream 35 years ago - doesn't come to fruition, but you move on with life. But it's somewhere back there. Then you turn 60, and your mom just dies, and you're looking for something. And the dream comes waking out of your imagination.
Virtual reality is a denial of reality. We need to be open to the powers of imagination, which brings something useful to reality. Virtual reality can imprison people.
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