Many of these were bugs, mishaps, or surprising experiences in VR (although the metaverse does not always need to involve VR), but the last one was a moment that was intentionally and successfully funny.
1. Accidentally pushing my friend out a virtual window in VR that the developers had forgotten to seal, terrifying both of us as we both screamed forgetting we were completely safe in real life
2. In a VR hangout with a group feeling like almost everyone was ignoring me, but then discovering that a bug was only allowing me to hear one person, but everyone could hear me and I had been talking over everyone for ten minutes
3. Participating in an immersive theatre performance of “The Tempest” in VR, ending in my friend and I “marrying” each other in a mock wedding surrounded by “wedding guests” wearing VR flower crowns
4. Playing mini golf in VR, but every time I completed a hole everyone else would freeze and we had to reset the game
5. Joining what was meant to be seriously meeting in VR, except my colleague’s avatar was malfunctioning and had become a see-through blue jello-y figure, so he started dancing around and pretending to be a ghost
6. Lending my spare headset to a coworker for him to join a meeting, forgetting to tell my team that he would be showing up as my avatar - leaving they shocked when they heard “me” starting to talk with a completely different (and male) voice
7. Flying for 20 minutes with a new VR friend towards a distant building that we thought was the goal of the game, but discovering that you couldn’t interact with the building in any way, and there was no goal to the game besides flying around
8. Organizing a team VR hangout and accidentally ending up in a VR club with an enthusiastic promoter who ushered all my coworkers around the club for different photo opportunities
9. Thinking I was talking to a bot because their voice was garbled nonsense, performing an adhoc Turing test (“Raise your hand if you’re human”) only to discover it was just a default voice setting and they were trying the same thing on me
10. Watching standup comedy in VR performed by a fellow data scientist (so many data puns!)
No comments.