Outside my office window is one of the major roads through the city. Nearly every day I see a very old blue van drive West, carrying what looks like industrial kitchen modules built into a trailer. Several hours later, I see it driving East with no such modules.

This van consumes me. Who is driving it? Where is it going every day? What are those things its carrying and why does it never carry them back? I daydream of setting up an overly complex surveillance operation to track the van and follow its mysterious load.

Then my subconscious figures out what was wrong with my code and I get back to work

I could see how the preset nice and calm scenes become even more dull than the gray sky.

At least here there is real weather, kids annoyingly playing the flute, dogs barking or doves procreating. That’s gotta be more exciting than seeing the same Moon rocks and Northern lights.

You’re focusing too much on the defaults. There’s nothing stopping a third party from capturing or building a bunch more scenes and selling them as an app. Probably as a subscription. I’d be surprised if there’s not someone right now trying to make or repurpose a procedurally generated forest.

And in principle, it would be possible to have a weather and environment broadcasted through cameras in any place in the world. And there are already VR games that get it quite right.

Yeah I’m curious about this possibility! What makes me skeptical is the temptation for distraction is so high in VR. I actually want the scene I stare at to be a bit boring because I’m not actually staring at it: I’m letting my eyes rest and effectively stop using brain resources while I think… does VR ever really let you “look away”? Maybe! I’m curious but it’s definitely not as simple of a problem as giving me a nice beach to look out on… I’d want to jump in and go snorkeling!