At 13, Vice’s Hamilton Morris had his first experience with drugs by smoking salvia divinorum in the back of a friend’s car. Today, at 23, Morris would probably never have guessed that he would be getting high for a living.
Morris claims to do it in the name of science. A chemist by training, he is on a journey to study rare drugs and their effects to a fanatical degree.
I’ve been following Morris’s Pharmacopeia on Vice for a while and I’ve always been fascinated by the people he has met, the places he has been and the things he has felt.
Yet strangely, as curious as I’ve always been, I’ve honestly never felt the desire to burn the secretion of a Sapo frog into my skin or take a drug that would ultimately turn me into a zombie. I wouldn’t want to destroy my body the way he has.
NEW WORLDS
The thing about Hamilton is that he chooses to indulge in the most extreme of psychedelics that seem to transport him to another world for a little while at what to me has always seemed like the highest of costs, health.
But what if you were offered a new alternative to psychedelic drugs that gave you a similar experience without the bad stuff that is associated with it? What if you could see what Hunter S. Thompson and Steve Jobs saw?
Now you can.
We were curious about the Oculus Rift and virtual reality, so we found someone who was willing to demo it to us and give us a tour of a world he built.
MEETING THE MAKER
I met Brandon Tay at his office in Singapore at a warehouse building. Brandon’s interest in art and all things tech led him to explore some of the most advanced technologies that has enabled him to find new platforms for showcasing his artwork, making him one of Singapore’s most talented artists.
A few years ago, Brandon became one of the first programmers in Singapore to provide the art of projection mapping commercially to companies. Mostly used as a guerrilla marketing tool, projection mapping, also known as video mapping, is a projection technology used to turn objects, often irregularly shaped, into display surfaces for video projection.
Hybrid by Brandon Tay
Visuals for Flying Lotus’s set for Coachella. Commissioned by StrangeLoop
We were meeting Tay because he told us of a new world, something we’ve heard of and something we knew could offer more. And it’s also something we’ve been desperate to try.
CULLING FALSE PERCEPTIONS OF THE RIFT
I wasn’t convinced that gaming, porn and movies were the Rift’s only applications, like what everyone thinks it’s meant to enhance or do.
I felt it, like the Oculus, could do more. I felt a large piece of a complex puzzle was missing.
“I think it’s about content. The technology is always there and I’m sure the Leap can do what it’s supposed to do but it’s about what we can create for it.”Brandon Tay
Content.
Brandon weighed in on our thoughts and he was right – the future is about content and it’s not content in the way we look at it now. It’s about how content is designed and presented to us and how we can interact with it. The future is about experiencing content rather than just consuming it.
ENTER THE RIFT. ENTER A WORLD
Then, Tay invited me to put on the Rift and asked if I was ready.
“Feel free to look around and remember to look behind you. Are you ready?” he asked me once I had adjusted the Rift around my head and closed all the gaps between the goggle and my face.
It had begun, and I was awakened. I was transported to this super-sexy psychedelic world that Tay built. It was a large cavernous world. I wanted to touch everything. It was three point five minutes of pure escape, and of having your thoughts and senses provoked everywhere you looked. It was a stirring visual thrill that I never wanted to end. Dreamlike would be a sad, underwhelming explanation of what I experienced. No. It was greater than that, larger than real life, perhaps even better. I didn’t want to leave this world.
It was realistic, vivid and surreal at the same time, what I would say would be akin to lucid dreaming, where one is aware that he or she is dreaming. A sort of transcendence that led to a neurological escape in my personal case and in the case based on the type of world Tay had built.
Then, it was over, and I wanted more.
The genius of the Oculus Rift therein lies in the content, feeling what I felt, taking my mind to another parallel world and thought. Applications for it in the health industry to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder, for example. Or for property development and architecture, like taking a tour of a showroom flat from your own home or your office without going there. Preparing for a skateboarding competition or a mountain biking trail in the US while you’re in Asia. It’s about you sitting here in front of me as I speak to you about the possibilities of the Oculus Rift while you are sitting in that chair reading this now.
Then, I imagined that this is what people like Hamilton Morris thought when they consumed their first psychedelic drug. At 14 years old, I don’t think it was done in the name of chemistry. It was probably done because it was an avenue for escape.
THE SETBACKS
But great technology can be hampered by poor content and applications, limiting its much larger importance to our future.
Take the porn industry, for example, perhaps the most literal, if not juvenile, application for the Rift. Imagine men going to virtual brothels that replicate the real world to spend time with the women of their dreams. Imagine sleeping with a celebrity who you’ve fantasised about all your adult life. But better still, imagine she has a mind of her own as she does in the real world and she interacts back with you and you feel everything she does to you.
Porn, like gaming and movies, is barely scratching the surface of what the Oculus can help us achieve. These applications are the most simplistic applications from our reality through the Rift and vice versa.
The Oculus Rift can be so much more than a gaming headset or a movie goggle or a pornographic application.
It might be a means to end the drug problem. It might be a means to save the world. It might end careers or even topple empires.
In the words of fake Mark Zuckerberg from a fictitious movie about Facebook: “We don’t know what it can be. We don’t know what it will be. We know it’s cool.”
I’ll continue following Morris on his journey through drugs and chemicals, but for now, I’m sticking with my Oculus.
You can download his app via your PC, or your Mac.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
150 MB available disk space
8MB RAM (16 recommended)
2.4 Ghz CPU
Any 3D graphic card (Nvidia or ATI) with 2GB ram (4 recommended)
