Caves in VR

“But what is reality?” asked the gnomelike man. He gestured at the tall banks of buildings that loomed around Central Park, with their countless windows glowing like the cave fires of a city of Cro-Magnon people. “All is dream, all is illusion; I am your vision as you are mine.” (Pygmalion’s Spectacles, S.G. Weinbaum, 1935)

Enter a cave and bearings vanish with the light. Emerge again, and the sun seems blinding. Caves appear in literature as places of passage because of this disorienting state. On entering a cave, there is no guarantee of finding enlightenment. Like Nietzsche’s abyss, it may just lead further into darkness. On exiting the cave, there is no guarantee of discovering truth about the world either. Like Plato’s allegory of the cave, even though you may finally think you have uncovered some truth about the world, those still in the cave, or even that part of you still in the cave, won’t believe you, and so a return to solitude may be inevitable.

What we do find though is difference.

In the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy called L’Inferno, Dante himself descends into hell, staged in a vast subterranean cave. The descent is a purification rite, and Dante descends into hell in order to find his way back to the path of righteousness. Hell is thus a process rather than a place.

Caliban’s “primitive” cave in The Tempest is often read as a symbol of his colonial subjugation, quite literally his “hard rock” or prison. In Act 1, Scene 2, Caliban laments Prospero’s siege of the island, and longs for the restoration of his rightful place as “king”:

For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o’ th’ island.
(1.2.331–342, Arden edition)

Caliban’s cave is a prison

Yet another case is the creature in Shelley’s Frankenstein, who does describe the ice caves he inhabits as a “dwelling,” but only insofar as they are places his human assailants dare not go. The cave here represents the fringes of statehood and the creature symbolizes being outside the State.

A more recent literary example is Toru Okada’s self-imposed sojourn in a well in Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicles. The character confines himself to the cavernous space as an ascetic gesture, a Buddhist attempt at being born again.

In each of these narratives, caves function as thresholds between negative states of being and the allure of renewal. In this sense, caves are portals of an opaque kind. Opaque because they never disclose what awaits on the outside. Not so much as a hint.

A new beginning?
More disorientation?
A traumatic experience?
Something transcendental?
Something plain and boring?
Something revelatory?

The metaverse is oddly full of caves. It is odd, because from its earliest imaginings, the metaverse has been framed by a vision of the sublime; a world elevated above the mundane. As Ioannidis and Kontis point out in their useful historicization of the metaverse, the 1935 science fiction short story, Pygmalion’s Spectacles, by S.G. Weinbaum, “depicts virtual reality for the first time and explores the idea of users escaping from the physical world to such an extent, that they question the nature of reality itself.” (p154).

It is worth sharing part of that depiction here to get a better sense of this early vision. The following scene depicts the protagonist Dan Burke trying on a pair of Professor Ludwig’s VR goggles in a seedy hotel room:

There was a moment of chaos. The liquid before Dan’s eyes clouded suddenly white, and formless sounds buzzed. He moved to tear the device from his head, but emerging forms in the mistiness caught his interest. Giant things were writhing there.

The scene steadied; the whiteness was dissipating like mist in summer. Unbelieving, still gripping the arms of that unseen chair, he was staring at a forest. But what a forest! Incredible, unearthly, beautiful! Smooth boles ascended inconceivably toward a brightening sky, trees bizarre as the forests of the Carboniferous age. Infinitely overhead swayed misty fronds, and the verdure showed brown and green in the heights. And there were birds—at least, curiously lovely pipings and twitterings were all about him though he saw no creatures—thin elfin whistlings like fairy bugles sounded softly.

He sat frozen, entranced. A louder fragment of melody drifted down to him, mounting in exquisite, ecstatic bursts, now clear as sounding metal, now soft as remembered music. For a moment he forgot the chair whose arms he gripped, the miserable hotel room invisibly about him, old Ludwig, his aching head. He imagined himself alone in the midst of that lovely glade. “Eden!” he muttered, and the swelling music of unseen voices answered.

By the end of the story, it becomes clear that Burke’s utterance of the word “Eden!” is in fact a real moment of elation. He is not elated at the idyllic world he sees in his headset, rather he is elated at the prospect of returning to the “miserable hotel room” — differently. Weinbaum introduces an interesting twist at the end of the story. Once Burke’s virtual odyssey has run its course, the professor reveals that the entire experience was staged. Not only was Burke’s soft-spoken metaverse companion “Galatea” played by a real-life actress, who happens to be the professor’s niece, but Burke’s own voice and persona in the metaverse were played by the professor himself.

Intriguingly, Burke is not dismayed by this revelation, but pleased at the prospect of being able to meet the “real” Galatea. The character name “Burke” is a reference to the Irish philosopher of immateriality, George Berkely As such, gritty reality becomes more idyllic than simulated paradise, but only because Burke recognizes how he has come back differently. Burke know’s that the professor’s niece is not Galatea, but still acts as if she were because he is fully invested in the enjoyment of the fantasy. The fantasy structures his social reality after the VR experience. In the Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Slavoj Zizek claims “The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not that of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself” (p.30).

VR technology reproduces this condition almost too perfectly. The VR headset becomes a kind of wearable cave, a fantasy enabling space that operates on the user’s transition back to gritty reality. You pass through the opaque portal of the cave, into a reality still structured by the fantasy. The on/off button on the side of VR headsets today may switch off the electricity flow, but the transmission has already happened. A threshold state between image and belief is in play.

References

Ioannidis, S., and A. P. Kontis. “The 4 Epochs of the Metaverse.” Journal of Metaverse, vol. 3, no. 2, 2023, pp. 152–165. https://doi.org/10.57019/jmv.1294970.

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, Arden Shakespeare, Bloomsbury, 2011.

Weinbaum, Stanley G. Pygmalion’s Spectacles. Project Gutenberg, 5 Oct. 2007, www.gutenberg.org/files/22893/22893‑h/22893‑h.htm.

Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. 2nd ed., Verso, 2008.