Deltcho Valtchanov, a twenty-something postdoc in cognitive
neuroscience at the University of Waterloo in Ontario who grew up in
the urban core playing video games. Valtchanov came to the topic not
because he was interested in nature or art, but because he was
interested in its antipode, technology. He wanted to validate, or even
ennoble, virtual reality, to prove that it could elicit “real” nervous
system activity. His university review board wouldn’t let him instill
fear in human subjects, so he started reading the dusty psych
literature on what made people feel relaxed instead, and he landed
upon nature. This was a surprise to him, and he didn’t really believe
it, not being much of a nature guy himself. But it worked so well to
soothe subjects in his master’s degree experiments that for his Ph.D.
research, he decided to try to deconstruct the visuals to figure out
why. The ultimate goal would be to make the virtual-reality
experience even better. Because if you could, there is no end to what a
couple of nerdy guys with a headset can do. “Why wouldn’t you
escape your real life?” asked Valtchanov. “This way, you can enjoy
your own living room and it’s relatively cheap. You can go to Hawaii
without the bugs and the jet lag.”
WHEN I LEARNED that Valtchanov had eventually developed a
smartphone app that could rate and categorize nature scenes and then,
ultimately, synthesize them, I had to check it out. He had recently
completed his doctoral work here on the featureless plain of southern
Ontario. When I visited on a gray, windy February day, I could see
how it might inspire VR. It also evidently inspires tech of all flavors.
Although most Americans have never heard of it, many Silicon
Valley gurus consider Waterloo to be their best feeder school, topping
even Stanford. Valtchanov, dressed in black jeans, a checked button-
down shirt and sporting a soul patch, led me through windowless
serpentine hallways in the basement of the psych building. We passed
a small room with photorealistic bright blue, cloud-speckled ceiling