Happy Nice Mall

Last Thursday evening, Wolf Heffelfinger played laser tag at the City Life Community Center in Mont., Missoula.

Wearing a pair of heavy goggles, he sped through the gym, firing fake laser guns with both hands. It wasn’t all that different from other laser tag games, except that it played in virtual reality.

While he and a friend were running around the gym, he saw himself jogging through the neon-lit corridors of a spacecraft. So is his friend. They could not see each other with the virtual reality glasses they put on their eyes. But in an imaginary world, they can chase each other.

For Mr. Heffelfinger, 48, musician, entrepreneur and free spirit, gaming was another step in a decade-long obsession with virtual reality. since your arrival Groundbreaking Oculus headset in 2013He played games in virtual reality, watched movies, visited distant lands and acquired new identities.

He sees his virtual adventures as a relentless quest for the dopamine rush that occurs when technology takes him to a new place. When technology reaches the limit of what it can do, its rush is lessened. He put many of his headphones on the shelf where they’ve been sitting for months. But when advances come, it bounces back.

Mr. Heffelfinger’s constant preoccupation is in sync with the tech industry’s constant engagement with virtual reality, and he’s invested billions in a concept that seems to be just steps away from going mainstream for several years.

Virtual reality technology is now available to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and other well-known executives.metadata store” – a digital world where people can communicate through virtual reality and other new and yet uninvented technologies, and repeated rumors that Apple will be included in the mix.

But there is the question of whether virtual reality is truly ready for mainstream consumers. Over the years, improvements have never quite met expectations. It’s as if science fiction—decades of novels, movies, and television about virtual reality—has consistently disappointed people.

“I want it to be a part of my life and I think it always will be,” said Mr Heffelfinger. “But the dream always ends.”

One floor below was a group of teenagers playing paintball while Mr. Heffelfinger was getting ready for the laser tag game at the Missoula community center. It was largely the same game: glasses, fake guns, and stalking around a gym. But young people remained in the real world.

When asked why he didn’t just sign up for an old-fashioned game of paintball, Mr. Heffelfinger replied that playing in the world of science fiction changed everything. He enjoyed being taken. “I can get into the movie,” he said.

It could even be a different person. As he and his friend John Brownell started the game, Called Space Pirate Arena, Mr. Heffelfinger chose a large, fleshy, flamboyant masculine avatar dressed in camouflage. Mr. Brownell chose someone very similar to actress Angelina Jolie. Mr. Heffelfinger imagined himself in a dystopian world.

“I thought of an episode of ‘Black Mirror’ where these two men fell in love with each other by choosing different avatars in virtual reality,” he said, referring to a science fiction series on Netflix. “I don’t think you realize the effect it has on me.”

Mr. Heffelfinger longs for something called lucid dreaming. He once made a short film about the difficult phenomenon in which dreams are experienced with full consciousness – a bit like the highly detailed, completely convincing dreams in Hollywood movies like “Inception.” and “Vanilla Sky.”

When he found virtual reality, he realized that it felt the same. “After a while, your brain is playing tricks on you,” he said. “You really believe it’s there.”

He first tried the Oculus at an office party, when it was just a test kit for software developers, and immediately ordered one of his kits. The experiences were short, simple, and cartoonish: a trip to the top of a skyscraper or a flight in a space capsule. But after Facebook bought the startup that pioneered the headset and pumped millions of dollars into the technology, other companies followed suit and the possibilities expanded.

Mr. Heffelfinger visited the Egyptian pyramids. Watched Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” in virtual reality while suspended from a float tank. It took a local police detective through a virtual recreation of Missoula, stitching together high-resolution photos and starting to see the technology as a way to examine a crime scene without being there. Sometimes, on cloudy Montana days, he would disappear into virtual reality just to see the sun.

“The nature of these fantasy worlds is that they feed dopamine into our brain’s reward pathways,” said Anna Lembke, a Stanford University psychiatrist and author of “Dopamine Nation” who studies addiction in the modern world. “They have the potential for addiction.”

But as with other addictions, tolerances are developed. It’s getting harder to reach high dopamine.

Mr. Heffelfinger is tired of every new headset. The experiences were repetitive. He couldn’t move as freely as he wanted. He couldn’t really connect with other people. Virtual reality didn’t quite fit the vibrancy of the real world and sometimes made him sick.

He turned one earpiece into a plant holder and the other into a piece of neckwear that he wore while hiking in the Montana mountains. “It turns out that a walk outside is a lot more fun,” he said.

But he always bought another pair of glasses. Sometimes, he spent hundreds of dollars on headsets for his friends, hoping they would join him in virtual reality. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, he saw technology as the ideal antidote to quarantine, and for a while it was. He could mingle with friends and strangers in an ethereal meeting place called AltspaceVR.

Visited the virtual recreation of the annual bohemian arts festival Burning Man with a female friend. As they wandered through desert campsites amid art installations, sculptures, powered cars and trucks, Mr. Heffelfinger had the uneasy feeling that a married man was on a date with someone who wasn’t his wife.

“We hung out a million times in real life and it never felt like a date,” she said. “It makes itself so much prettier in VR.”

He then told his wife what had happened, and to make up for it, he bought her a headset and invited her into virtual reality. As they entered a virtual cocktail bar, he heard the voice of the woman he was taking to Burning Man, and she approached them from across the room.

“Can’t we go anywhere before one of your women shows up?” said his wife, before her avatar walked away and limped. He had taken off his earphones.

It was a strange and unexpected mix of real and virtual. In the past, the three of them had spent time together in the real world. He knew it wouldn’t happen again.

Mr. Heffelfinger soon removed his earphones. His Oculus was sitting in a green box at the top of his sauna. But a few months later, he came across a video about Space Pirate Arena.

“I am disgusted with VR,” he said. “But now I’m back.”

Probably will get bored again. Like many people who use technology, he believes it will be many more years before it becomes an unwavering part of everyday life. And no matter how good the technology is, she admits she’s wary of spending too much time there.

“I love getting into virtual reality,” he said. “But I always want to go out.”