**Warning: Spoilers for the currently airing Season 4 of HBO’s Silicon Valley below. Continue at your own risk!**
This past Sunday, April 30th, Episode 2 of Silicon Valley’s 4th season aired and virtual reality occupied a minor side plot throughout the episode. When the trailer released for this year’s run of the show it seemed like virtual reality would claim a more prominent role in the show, but we haven’t seen that come to fruition in the episodes themselves quite yet.
If you’re reading this right now, chances are you’re aware of the fact that VR is absolutely taking the world by storm in recent years and ground zero for its meteoric rise in popularity is none other than the tech capital of the world, Silicon Valley. Naturally, a comedy focused on the region would address it eventually.
For this most recent episode, Erlich Bachman (T.J. Miller) catches wind that one of the tenants Jian-Yang (Jimmy O. Yang), staying at his home that doubles as a tech incubator is seeking funding for a new application that presumably is related to VR. Upon finding out, Bachman states, “It’s a VR play. That’s the frothiest space in the valley right now. Nobody understands it, but everybody wants in. Any idiot could walk into a f*cking room, utter the letters ‘V’ and ‘R’ and VCs will hurl bricks of cash at them. By the time they find out it’s vaporware it’s too late. I have got to get in on this.”
I mean, he’s not wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mydFes629og
Naturally, you learn that things aren’t quite as wonderful as they seemed at first and the idea doesn’t appear to be anywhere near as lucrative s Bachman was initially hoping. In the trailer (embedded above) we see VR and AR devices in use on more than one occasion, potentially hinting that there could be much more in the works.
In an interview last year with The Daily Beast, series creator Mike Judge stated that, “We explored invented reality and visited some AR and VR companies, and yeah, there’s a whole new wave coming of this stuff. And we might do some of it on the show…Just the whole VR world that’s blowing up right now. We’ll explore that.” It sounds like our budding new industry will be in the spotlight more as the season continues.
Do you watch Silicon Valley? Let us know what you think in the comments below!
