Living in an unreal world

Indeed, sometimes it’s difficult to imagine a cosy and comfortable office when a project is still at the stage of a hole in the ground or when all you can see are construction workers and iron girders. But this is not only the case with office projects. Residential and retail developers face a similar dilemma. “After all this is what artistic renderings, designs and the documentation are for,” someone might say. This may be true, but in times of rapid technological progress aimed at making life more comfortable – which clearly people have quickly grown accustomed to – it is difficult to convince someone to rent or buy space by getting them to flick through a few hundred pages of the construction design. You need to make your case more concisely and show what you mean in a clear, attractive and simple manner. Pictures are still the basic way of dogin this, but interactive methods, such as 3D goggles or animated films that show you an apartment or an office in virtual reality, are all the rage. One app will even allow you to jump off a skyscraper: “The fall itself is not terrifying, but that’s only out of care for the viewer,” the man who made the animation explained to me. It’s difficult to disagree with that; just standing on the edge of the roof of a virtual skyscraper might give you the willies. And they’re working on even more advanced applications. It’ll be possible to go on a virtual sightseeing tour around one planned skyscraper in groups.

Virtual reality is of key importance here with its ability to generate very real sensations. While humanity has been unable to agree for thousands of years as to what or who created our universe, the creators of virtual reality are living among us and creating new worlds. After taking off my 3D headset I immediately thought of a rhyme by Jan Brzechwa: “Welcome to our tale today, the elephant has come to play, Pinocchio will sing, you’ll see, and then they’ll dance around the tree, for anything here can be done, when the animals are having fun.” If we don’t make a better effort to use our own imaginations, we will end up – for better or worse – prisoners of these virtual worlds, as wel as of advertising slogans, stereotypes, political dogma and those who devise such fictions. They invent worlds for others to live in and we treat them as the hosts of Westworld. In this TV series, set in a highly sophisticated ‘entertainment park. the boundary between the virtual and the real is almost completely blurred for the enjoyment of the punters.

Not only individuals but entire societies can lose themselves in this tangle of messages, as in the Brexit referendum. The Brits chose to believe hypocritical politicians and jumped into the rabbit hole – and where did they wake up? On the other side of the mirror, in the land of Oz or in Mordor? Perhaps I’m exaggerating, maybe there was some method in all this madness... and the UK proves itself to have been extraordinarily prescient in cutting itself off from the rest of the continent...

There’s a taste of fear in the air, but when you hear from a former deputy prime minister that Brexit has destabilised the entire geostrategic and political situation in Europe, when the president of a very large company with a pan-European reach says he’s already saving money for post-crisis acquisitions, the atmosphere starts to become even more ominous. For now the orchestra is still playing, but is it just playing on, like the one on the Titanic? In one way or another, it seems that everyone should make sure they have a lifeboat ready. But who will be able to find one if there aren’t enough? Will these be the people who need to have everything shown to them – or those with imagination?