Pattern Matching
Virtual Reality Won. Just Not the Kind You Think.
Online spaces like ‘Fortnite’ and ‘Animal Crossing’ are replacing the physical world
Welcome to the second issue of Pattern Matching, OneZero’s weekly newsletter that puts the week’s most compelling tech stories in context. (You can find the first issue, and a brief introduction, here.) I’m Will Oremus, senior writer at OneZero.
As authorities prepare to ease lockdown orders across the country, it’s becoming clear that the “reopening” we’d all looked forward to doesn’t mean returning to anything like normalcy. Like the war on terror, the battle against coronavirus might be one that drags on for years without a real exit strategy.
Against that backdrop, we can expect a flourishing of what I’ll call “pandemic-ready” tech — platforms and tools built for a future in which social distancing is a fact of life, or at least a specter that could return at any time. What these tools have in common is that they obviate the need for physical presence.
Take virtual reality, a term that has its roots in early 1980s cyberpunk fiction but which, these days, is associated with clunky headsets, immersive graphics, and commercial failure. There’s still a chance that coronavirus will make that…
