previews
“Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-garde”
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum
Philadelphia
Philadelphia
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PRINT November 2017
WILDEST DREAMS
Douglas Coupland, Daniel Birnbaum
DANIEL BIRNBAUM: Have you seen anything memorable in VR?
DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Yes . . . it was a beautiful summer evening three years ago. I’d invited a few friends over, and one of them arrived with the most recent Oculus Rift headset. I had two VR experiences. First, I flew over a Cajun swamp in pursuit of purple lights in the distance. Then I collected asteroids in the rings of Saturn. No sound.
The twist was that when I removed the goggles, I looked at my favorite room in the world, filled with good friends on that beautiful summer evening, and I thought, Man, what a dump.
The thing about VR is