A person with VR lens on is a mime artist of the digital age.
A mime artist is immersed in their own world, doing things that come from their head, and externalizes that imaginary event through exaggerated gestures. A mime artist constructs an alternative reality, an reality that no one among the audience can experience directly.
The audience can deduce the mime artist’s imaginary world through theory of mind, the ability to think in other people’s shoes, to empathize. It can also be explained by mirror neurons. For instance, if person A sees another person B throw a basketball, neurons in A’s brain that correspond to the action of throwing a ball will be activated.
Without a word, the modern VR user senses an alternative reality, interacts with it, while the rest can neither experience nor interact with this digital reality. But the VR user is often the agent of gaze, not the object. When the VR user becomes the object of gaze, they become quite comparable to mime artists, doing things completely disconnected from the material world and their immanent community.
Without the VR lens, a person making the same set of gestures cannot evade the persona as either a performer or a lunatic. But the same can be argued conversely — despite the lack of a pair of VR lens, will a lunatic ever be on an alternative reality, experiencing an interface that you cannot access?
Virtual is relativistic. What is the meaning of virtual? The modern context has made us take technology as a default and a premise to the virtual, whereas in fact, technology is merely a craft, a tool to help the VR user quickly get into the delusional mental state. In this sense, technology is only used in the scenario where one couldn’t get into the target alternative state by pure imaginative powers within.
Reality is relativistic. It is generally the consensus of most people.
No matter a performer or a user, life has given these people a common name — clowns.
