Playing with the Christmas Toys

Husband, master of finding amazing things for way less than retail, found a PS4 VR system for the kids for Christmas. It's a kick. I loved playing it, but I found out really quickly that virtual reality makes me ill. A good twenty minutes of play will leave me feeling like I have raging morning sickness for the rest of the day. No, thank you! The kids don't seem to suffer those side effects, so that's a happy thing. If I wasn't going to barf all over everything, I'd be fighting them for turns. I had so much fun playing Space Pirate and Job Simulator. Surprise plot twist: I'm a pretty good shot when I'm a space pirate in an almost 3D environment.

(whispers) "Virtual reality is real!"

(Remember this little nugget from the mid-nineties? Husband and I still make fun of it.)

VR.5

Another weird thing that happened was that I had some spatial reasoning problems after I finished playing. When you're wearing the VR headset and moving around in the game, you obviously have to be careful not to run into furniture and walls in real space. But my brain refused to accept that I was in real space after I took the headset off. I had to keep reassuring myself that what I was seeing was actually what was sharing space with me--that the couch was really, actually in front of me, or that I was really walking around the dining table. For a while, I found myself flinching, expecting myself to run into walls or furniture even though I was literally walking around in real space and could see all the walls and furniture. It was a very unsettling sensation.

These issues might be age, but they might also be related to the fact that when I was twelve years old, I broke the record for spinning the longest on our sit-and-spin.

See, we used to pull the wheel off the sit-and-spin and place the seat of the piano bench on the base of the sit-and-spin (the piano bench seat had come completely unscrewed from the base, which sometimes caused painful yet hilarious accidents if you didn't balance it perfectly on the base before sitting down to play the piano), and then we would kneel on the seat and push on the floor to get a really good spin going. I spun like that for over ten minutes to break the record. If you don't think that's very long, go ahead and set the timer for ten minutes and just spin around without stopping. I'll wait.

Since that day, I have never been able to spin on an amusement park ride or even ride in a fast elevator without feeling the urge to projectile vomit. Virtual reality must really mess with my equilibrium.

On that pleasant note, I hope you had a happy Christmas. I'm still enjoying my time off, and, weather permitting, will be going to see my grandson at the end of the week because Sian and her family came back from Las Vegas early. This time, I'll try to remember to take pictures.