Let’s light this candle, shall we?

Look, don’t get your hopes up. This is just an experiment. But it could be fun. The good news is that you don’t need anything special. You don’t need to download anything. You don’t even need a VR rig (although it makes it more fun). All you need is a browser, which I strongly suspect you’ve got, and click here. Once you are there, change the avatar, and for goodness sake, change the name to something meaningful. Hopefully some of you will have a microphone headset so we can talk, but it’s OK if you just float around. Like I said, this is an experiment. Let’s see if one or two of us can bump into each other virtually. Come on in!

Some of you old-timers here may remember that, years ago, I set up a virtual reality system here in my house. (Well, not exactly; my beloved and way-smarter-than-me son built the computer and put the VR together). It was, for its time, impressive, but wow was it cumbersome. It had a dedicated tower computer, multiple “scanning” devices positioned around the room to track where we were, a bulky headset, two hand controllers, and long, cumbersome wires all over the place. It was the best the world had to offer, and it was a total kludge, besides being very expensive.

Still, we had fun with it. In one of my prouder moments as a father, my daughter recorded herself in a virtual bar, beating the hell out of other patrons.