Future Presence, Peter Rubin
Future Presence, Peter Rubin
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Future Presence
How Virtual Reality Is Changing Human Connection, Intimacy, and the Limits of Ordinary Life

Author: Peter Rubin

Narrator: Roger Wayne

Unabridged: 6 hr 43 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 04/17/2018


Synopsis

A Wired senior editor and virtual reality expert presents a captivating, candid glimpse into the future ""realities"" of this emerging technology: how we will use it to form previously impossible relationships, explore new frontiers of intimacy, and how it will forever change human connection.Heralded as the most significant technological innovation since the smartphone, virtual reality is poised to transform our very notions of life and humanity. Though this tech is still in its infancy, to those on the inside, it is the future. VR will change how we work, how we experience entertainment, how we feel pleasure and other emotions, how we see ourselves, and most importantly, how we relate to each other in the real world. And we will never be the same.Peter Rubin, senior culture editor for Wired and the industry’s go-to authority on the subject, calls it an ""intimacy engine."" While once we needed another person to feel the sensations of closeness, trust, vulnerability, confidence, and titillation, VR will give us the ability to induce these sensations by ourselves for the first time in human history. This metamorphosis, Rubin argues, is going to have a powerful impact on relationships that will ripple throughout our society and our individual lives.A journey into this uncertain future and a glimpse at the cultural implications and promises of a new reality, Future Presence explores a host of complex questions about what makes us human, what connects us, and what is real. Offering a glimpse into the mind-blowing things happening in universities, labs, and tech companies around the world, Rubin leads readers on an entertaining tour of the weirdest, wildest corners of this fascinating new universe. Describing this book as ""half travelogue and half crystal ball"", Rubin will:Introduce readers to the creators and consumers of VR technologyShow readers what an experience is like inside the current VR devicesExplain how this technology will upend everything we know about human connection in the futureAt once the incredible, inevitable story of virtual reality’s rise and a look towards the future of our fantasies, Future Presence is a deeply personal examination of what connects us, and an analysis of what relationships, empathy, and sex could look like—sooner than we think.

About Peter Rubin

Peter Rubin leads WIRED’s editorial efforts on digital platforms and oversees culture coverage in the magazine and online. He covers virtual reality extensively, having written the magazine’s June 2014 cover story on Oculus; he has broken a number of stories centered on the emergent platform; and he continues to make frequent media and panel appearances discussing the technology (as well as general pop culture). Rubin’s writing has also appeared in the New York Times, GQ, Rolling Stone, Complex, Vibe, Glamour, Details, and many other outlets.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Kyle on June 29, 2018

Trusting his journalistic instinct, Rubin puts people up front in the story of technological breakthroughs, and in this case it is a 90-year-old grandmother experiencing VR for the first time (whereas the real story is the goofball grandson uploading private moments into the public sphere). The more......more

Goodreads review by Joe on November 11, 2018

Virtual reality, once the subject of science fiction, is now finally available to regular consumers and leaping into the mainstream. The author, Peter Rubin, takes his readers on a journey from the first faltering steps with early crude prototypes to today's rapidly evolving headsets with advanced s......more

Goodreads review by Adeel Tausif on June 28, 2018

Easy to follow summary of the HMD market. A great way to see whats happening in virtual, augmented and mixed reality.......more

Goodreads review by Noémie J. Crowley on July 26, 2020

Ecrit par le rédacteur en chef du magazine Wired, ce livre traite de la réalité virtuelle (VR), et de ses possibles applications et utilités dans le futur, et de tous les changements qu’elle pourrait apporter dans nos sociétés, que ce soit au niveau médical, du commerce, ou même social. Un livre trè......more

Goodreads review by William on July 26, 2024

Most of the attempts at humor fell flat. The book was repetitive; the author kept going on and on about presence and intimacy though they are significant aspects of VR. Perhaps he or Jaron Lanier was under an NDA but the meeting with the latter was disappointingly short. It was nice to read about st......more