On a frosty December morning in 1783, some 400,000 people gathered in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris to see the world's first manned flight in a hydrogen balloon. Jacques Charles and his assistant, Nicolas-Louis Robert, ascended 1,800 feet into the sky accompanied by a mercury barometer, some sandbags, and a few bottles of champagne.
"Nothing will ever quite equal that moment of total hilarity that filled my whole body at the moment of take-off," Charles later wrote. "I felt we were flying away from the Earth and all its troubles for ever."
Back on the ground, feelings were more ambivalent. Benjamin Franklin, then the American ambassador to France, watched the scene from his carriage. A cynical companion remarked, "What's the use of a balloon?" Franklin, aghast, replied, "What's the use of a newborn baby?"
His point: You're not thinking big enough.
When Joseph Banks, then the president of England's Royal Society, first got word in a letter from Franklin about the balloons, he too demanded to know their practical applications. There were some obvious implementations—geographical mapping and military reconnaissance sprung first to mind—but he questioned whether ballooning could otherwise "prove beneficial either to society or science." Banks proposed one such practical use-case: a system using balloons to reduce the load on horse-pulled wagons. The idea was that broad-wheeled wagons, which normally would require eight horses to draw, would need just two using such a method.
Franklin, with a bit more foresight, argued ballooning could "pave the way to some discoveries in Natural Philosophy of which at present we have no conception." He compared ballooning to "magnetism and electricity, of which the first experiments were mere matters of amusement."
Like those hydrogen balloons, small thinking has plagued the development of one of today's flashiest technologies, virtual reality devices. When Oculus, the company that (literally) kickstarted the new VR revolution, originally pitched its device as a "headset designed specifically for video games that will change the way you think about gaming forever," hardly anyone—least of all gamers—questioned the idea that VR should be anything other than a high-end gaming accessory. Like a new graphics card or a better TV, it would be a logical, utilitarian improvement to current display technology for games—a horse-drawn carriage, now improved with balloons.
We've had a few years to get used to the idea of VR, and some have started getting a little more high-minded about its possibilities. WIRED has been eager to lead the charge, as when it declared a few months ago that VR will "change gaming, movies, TV, music, design, medicine, sex, sports, art, travel, social networking, education, and reality." Of course, it always has been the tendency of magazines to breathlessly celebrate new technologies. In a 1788 article, Gentleman's Magazine (the first periodical to use the word "magazine" to describe itself) celebrated the advent of hydrogen ballooning as "the most magnificent and astonishing discovery that has been made for many ages, or perhaps since the creation." Time, Gentleman's Magazine assured its readers, would reveal the utility of ballooning experiments.
Now, though, even the most breathlessly optimistic VR fanboys can't help but ask: What will be "the killer app" for these new devices? (Palmer Luckey's Franklin-esque response? "What's the real world's killer app?")
To be fair, what people really mean when they ask about VR's killer app is mostly How will you convince regular people to strap this to their face? That's probably a valid concern. People wearing Oculus headsets look terribly stupid.
Recently, at a VR convention, I walked down a hallway and passed by a guy—a shockingly skinny one, even by tech enthusiast standards—sitting on a bench, wearing an Oculus Rift, oblivious to his surroundings. Sitting next to him on the bench was a book, supporting a mouse, which he flicked rapidly, manipulating unseen objects in a world visible only to him.
He raised his hand to adjust his headgear, and I saw an opportunity to be a terrible person. I quietly moved in, picked up his mouse, and moved it a few feet further down the bench. The helmeted Rift user's hand glided back to where he'd left it, and found only air. I watched as he frowned and fumbled around, and it occurred to me that even if engineers totally solve VR's motion-sickness problem, they'll never be able to stop VR users from getting trolled.
As CES kicks off next month and dozens of new VR companies pitch their innovations, executives and investors will inevitably ask, "What's the killer app? A killer app, by definition, is a piece of software that makes a piece of technology worthy of purchase by the masses. It makes sense to ask that of a game console, because there's never been a game console that was self-justifying. A game console, or pretty much any new consumer gadget will flounder if it doesn't get a killer app within a few months of its release. Without them, game consoles and other devices have no utility.
VR isn't like that.
Like human flight, or the ability to undo mistakes in our past, the desire to escape reality (or forge a new one) is a dream older than technology. It's the kind of thing ancient cultures wrote myths about. When people ask, "What's the killer app for VR?" they're assuming VR will follow the path of regular consumer products from one of the many companies trying to sell us stuff. Many of us play this game with Apple every time a new iPhone is coming out: "This company is going to have to somehow justify the existence of the crap it's selling to me," we say, "or nobody will buy it."
But to demand a killer app for VR is to ask about the immediate, capitalistic utility of something capable of doing something bigger, of touching a part of the human spirit that's much older than the modern drive to have the newest, shiny gadget.
You can see it on the faces of people who've just left an Oculus demo. They look dazed, a little bleary-eyed, like they've just woken up, having been interrupted from a sweet dream. "Put me back in," said a guy next to me after stepping out of a demo of Oculus' Crescent Bay prototype. "I want to stay in there."
On the day of Charles and Robert's first flight, they floated aimlessly for two hours, landing 27 miles away in a field. In a profoundly unwise moment, Charles asked Robert to step out of the basket, not realizing that the reduced weight would cause the balloon to take off again.
Free of the other man's extra weight, the balloon lifted off again, this time climbing far higher than before: 10,000 feet in only ten minutes. Charles kept his calm and made it back to Earth by slowly emptying his reserve of gas, but the experience terrified him. He never stepped into a balloon again.
The first balloons were easily broken, dangerous inventions with no practical application in the real world, but they captured people's imaginations. The moment that daredevil Frenchmen like Jacques Charles and the Montgolfier brothers began filling huge bags with gasses and bouncing all over the countryside, a craze began. Ballomania took over Europe, and progress towards achieving the dream of true human flight became inevitable. It didn't matter that strapping balloons to carriages wasn't actually useful, because people who could see further knew ballooning was just a baby that just needed nourishment to grow. Today, we can reasonably draw a straight line from the first balloon to the creation of the field of aeronautics, to the first airplanes, through to the rockets that put mankind on the moon.
Go to any VR convention, and you'll see that pretty much every demo at the show is flawed in ways that would make it poorly suited for regular consumers. Motion sickness is still a problem for many, and most of the demos invented by the many developers experimenting with VR throw the infantile stage of the field into stark relief.
In truth, that doesn't matter. With well over 100,000 experimenters who've purchased VR developer kits making baby steps towards discovering bigger, more significant uses for VR, we've crossed the line that ballooning crossed that December day in Paris in 1783. Virtual reality doesn't need a killer app. It just needs to work in its most basic form—to fly—so the crazy people tinkering with it can lead us all someplace new.
*For more on the history of ballooning, read Richard Holmes' book *Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air.
